


An Education

by maedron



Series: the years start coming and they don't stop coming [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Beards (Facial Hair), Body Dysphoria, Hallucinations, Laws and Customs Among the Eldar, Multi, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Politics, Therapy, Transgender themes, Transphobia, eldritch peredhil, emerging adult elrond™, kind of a workplace comedy more than anything else lol, overmuch conflation of gender dysphoria and peredhel dysphoria probably, why pay for therapy when you can write a novella about elrond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:27:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 46,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27464191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maedron/pseuds/maedron
Summary: “You know, some days I rather wonder what the bottom half of your face looks like.” Gil-galad cups his own smooth chin. “Círdan himself would envy that beard. And he’s had since time immemorial to grow his.”--A story about Elrond becoming Elrond, in Lindon and environs during the very early Second Age. (Now complete, but undergoing ongoing/sporadic construction to resolve inconsistencies with "A Marriage Plot.")
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar & Elrond Peredhel, Elrond Peredhel & Elros Tar-Minyatur, Elrond Peredhel & Ereinion Gil-galad, Elrond Peredhel & Erestor, Elrond Peredhel / Original Non-Binary Character, Ereinion Gil-galad / Original Transfeminine Character
Series: the years start coming and they don't stop coming [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2133981
Comments: 16
Kudos: 76





	1. Elros

**Author's Note:**

> basically I got really mad about the existence of the am*z*n series, re-read the silm for the first time in 10 years, and decided it was now or never to write my bildungsroman for Emerging Adult Elrond™. 
> 
> Notes as of 2/15/21: this was my first venture into Tolkien fanfic in Many Years, and it was a real learning curve - now that I'm doing more research for the sequel I am learning How Many Things I Got Wrong!! Many many things! Possibly too many to count! My own worldbuilding, especially around TGNC identity, has also evolved, so trying to retcon in edits to this fic to make it more consistent with the sequel. Anyway probably only I care about this.
> 
> Significant canon fails or semi-fails: 
> 
> \- I started this fic in a rush of Feeling and have gotten twelve chapters in without realizing how much I fucked up the timelines. So, this is an AU where (a) Númenor is established (and Elros leaves Middle-earth) much earlier in the Second Age than the year 34 or whatever it is canonically. 
> 
> \- I'm using the continuity that Galadriel and Celeborn went into Eriador/to Lake Nenuial immediately at the beginning of the Second Age, rather than staying in Lindon. (I swear this is a thing in "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn," in spite of Tolkien Gateway and HoGaC itself gaslighting me.)
> 
> \- in the spirit of slapdash enthusiasm, and in spite of the fact that I had ruth s. noel's "the languages of tolkien's middle-earth" within 5 feet of me at all times while writing this, for the most part I simply just made up all the non-canonical sindarin (and otherwise) names! if any of them actually means "potato" or something that's on me!

**Elros**

They are one body, until they are not. Elrond remembers feeling his brother’s every wound, singing with his brother’s voice, fighting with his brother’s limbs. Looking into his brother’s eyes and finding a mirror image, grey on grey. 

And then, one spring, they grow beards. 

Elros is indifferent. He doesn’t even seem to notice his sudden mustache, as if it has always been there, is unfazed by the quickly withdrawn stares on the part of ancient and slightly decrepit Noldos in the halls of Amon Ereb. They've had enough trouble getting used to the sight of strange Elf children who seem to grow too quickly, and are only now realizing the meaning of _peredhil_ , the paradoxical biological fact of it. But if his brother’s silken upper lip now startles, Elrond’s patchy cheeks and neck—endlessly, unconsciously picked at, mottled with scabs—inspire only pity. 

Eventually someone produces a razor. 

“I suppose it’s like…hm…this?” Maglor says, and slices into the tender flesh beneath Elros’s chin. Elrond holds up a handkerchief to his brother’s neck as the small wound bleeds with surprising force, while their foster-parent frets around for a supposed ointment. 

“Father,” he says with the firmness, he has learned, required to break the old Fëanorian’s fugue states. “Would you please leave?” 

Maglor departs with a mournful sigh—Elrond can picture the handwringing. 

“You don’t have to be so cruel,” Elros says, but he is smirking. 

“Keep your head back. He’s already forgotten.” Indeed, the telltale humming has resumed down the hall—the eternal, internal symphony. “Hold it there.” 

His brother staunches the wound while Elrond locates the first acceptable-looking vial in the poorly organized cabinets, some kind of scented oil. 

“Do _not_ put that on my face. It smells awful.” 

“Too late.” Elrond slaps a palmful onto his cheek. 

“Ugh!” Elros retches. “Like a whole rotting rose garden plus…damp firewood. And ass.” 

“Suppose Maedhros used to put this on for Findekáno?” Elrond rubs it into his brother’s face, relishing the Quenya. Just for fun. 

“There is a razor right there. I will not hesitate to absolutely, completely murder you.” 

Elrond takes up the blade. “You’re far too wounded to commit a kin-slaying.” 

(Humor, in recent years, has become a bit of a coping mechanism for it all.) 

“I said keep your head back.” 

Elros rolls his eyes. “What exactly is your plan here?” 

His brother inches toward the mustache. “To remove this abomination.” 

“I like it!” 

“And _I_ have the razor.”

###

There is a Choice ahead of them, and then there are Choices that have already been made. The choice of Lúthien, the choice of Idril Celebrindal. The choice of the sons of Fëanor at Doriath—the choice never given to Dior, to Eluréd or Elurín—and again at Sirion. Where Elros and Elrond, twain _peredhel_ , another matching set, came into the story; and here remain, strangely still alive in the hands of captors who have been the ruin of so many kin to them.

And then there is the new star on the horizon, and the rumor of the grave errand their mother and father have undertaken—have succeeded in, the evidence blazing coldly in the western sky. Evidence that Elwing, who they have mourned as long as they can remember, lived; but she did not come back for them, and will not. 

When Eärendil rises, Maedhros and Maglor—who have seemed so often absent from their bodies, to the point not infrequently of neglect, matted braids and frayed robe-sleeves—are awakened by a slow-burning, clockwork rage. Elrond knows this is the Oath embodied; that he can feel his own kind of anger towards the risen star and its guardians chills him.

Maedhros, who the twain have always feared more, assumes a dark radiance about the eyes. The phrase “terrible to behold,” it turns out, is not just for lays and historical annals. After largely ignoring their existence for some years, he insists Elros and Elrond be instructed in the sword. He takes on much of the teaching himself between errands of battle and fraught politicking with various factions of Elves who distrust him utterly; they are in the early days of the new war. 

Once past the initial lessons, these practice duels take on the character of fell combat with a real foe—Maedhros, with his cruel left-handed hook, fits the part all too well. 

This seems to be the import of the whole strange ritual: to confirm the mutual enmity of foster-sons and parents, long burbling beneath the surface of awkward domesticity. Maglor watches sadly from the margins, pretending to tune harp-strings. There is a design to it that Elrond will perceive someday: some rite of disavowal, of preparation for the time to come. Their days under the fraught protection of the Fëanorians are numbered; indeed, the days of this brief, violent Age itself. 

But to Elros it only another reason to be infuriated by their captors, doubly so when the twain are kept sheltered from real combat. The fury stokes his prowess; it is not long before he is besting survivors of the Nirnaeth at sparring, his spirit like a bright and quick-burning flame powered by some endless fuel source. Or so one imagines it might be immortalized in song. 

The Choice is still abstract, its already vague mechanism half remembered from their mother’s simplified bedtime stories in the better days at Sirion. But this is what confounds Elrond: whereas his brother Elros is both completely an Elf and completely a Man, he remains some kind of mongrel, a half-breed, misshapen, confused. Of heart and mind, yes: twisted with love for a foster-father accessory to the murder of generations of his relatives, with anger at his real parents, whose reality fades with each repetition of their celestial legend. 

Yet more simply, shallowly, Elros has grown to look the part of both, being (a) tall (b) lushly and elegantly bearded, with an inborn talent for the maintenance therein (c) of muscular yet slender build (d) shiny-haired in all weather conditions (e) of piercing gray eye etc. etc. Whereas Elrond: (a) gangly (b) asymmetrical of face (c) frizzy braids (d) somehow either thinly bearded or mountainous with stubble by mid-afternoon, whenever he attempts to go clean-shaven (e) not as tall as Elros. 

The eyes are the same, at least, but Elrond sees his brother now as a trick mirror. Or perhaps it is Elrond who is the trick; if in the one there is the embodiment of all their sacred lineage, Elf and Maia and Man, why even bother with the other? 

They are very young when the war begins; they will be young yet when it ends. Maglor, out of the love, guilt and foresight that are his wont, contrives to keep them out of it until their third decade. Even then, they are assigned positions behind the frontlines, as ancillary squires to the ancient Noldo knights of whom they grew up underfoot. 

Almost immediately, Elros escapes to join up with the Houses of the Edain. Sensing that his brother is at least not dead, through some primeval connection he wasn’t aware was there in years of constant togetherness, Elrond is far too angry to even investigate where he has disappeared to. Yet the rumors filter through of the son of Eärendil, who fights with the strength of ten, vanquishing the hosts of Angband. 

Elrond wants to fight, too, and does. Some. Unfortunately, he has betrayed an annoying talent for logistics. The movement of vast war-camps throughout Beleriand—its lands now variously buckling into fiery chasms, scorched by dragon-fire, flooded by the sudden redirection of heretofore predictable rivers—requires adaptability; adaptability requires foresight, calculation, contingencies, large ledgers of sums and formulas, infinite candles burning into the night. The sourcing of candles, of ink, swords, arrows, dried meat, grain, ale and wine, wool in the winter, chunks of lake-ice in the summer, buttons, boot-leather, bandages. 

Decades pass, measured by supply chains. If Elrond encounters his brother, it is inadvertently and never at length. 

It has been nearly three years since their last meeting when they are each summoned to the glorious camp of the Valar; or rather to a surprisingly pedestrian waiting area outside the tent of Eönwë herald of Manwë, where they sit on opposite ends of a bench. 

“You’re an accountant.” Elros blinks beneath his silver diadem. His men, the remnant of the Edain, have made him chieftain. 

“Acting senior accountant of the eastern regiment, though that’s a new appointment.” Elrond tugs at the stiff collar of his new robe. “My predecessor…is lately deceased. Fell into some pit or another. Promotion’s a bit too easy to come by these days. As you know.” 

“Elrond.” His brother claps him on both shoulders, thunderously; when did his hands become so boulder-like? They have not touched in years. “Did you see our father?” 

Elros’s searing gaze is difficult to meet. “Maglor was last observed wandering the western edge of the new continent.” 

In a simpler time and place, Elrond can imagine getting a noogie. This older Elros only moves away, taking his head in his hands. 

“How it is,” he manages, “the kinslayers hold sway on your heart, _still_ …” 

“We never knew Eärendil. Not even when he, well, _existed_ in the non-ethereal realm. He never tarried at Sirion between voyages…”

“Do you hear yourself? Do you honestly hear what you sound like? Elrond, look around you. The time to dwell on childhood is long past. The _gods_ have asked us here. They intend us for something. Our father dealt the killing blow to Ancalagon the Black. Broke his body upon Thangorodrim. Brought down the towers!” 

Elrond had, of course, seen, shading his eyes from the blinding raiment of the heavenly mariner, filled with awe and with dread as Vingilot rushed the enemy’s aerial defenses. 

“There were quite a few eagles in the mix, I recall. Might have helped.” 

Elros takes a breath that is not unlike Ancalagon the Black stoking his fuselage. The rancorous membrane around Elrond’s tender feelings clutches comfortably. Yes, he wants his brother’s anger, anger to match his. Pain to ease the coming parting, its particulars soon to be revealed but its inevitability long perceived. They have already been parted for years; that they are not already strangers to one another betrays the bond, frayed but still holding, that must be dealt its own killing blow. 

But Elros only sighs. “Brother, I wish you knew what we are capable of.” 

Elrond can’t think of anything to say to that—the love and the condescension of it—and so doesn’t. They are quiet together; simmering, cooling. An old pattern; a comfort, honestly. The daylight, air, birdsong of the Valar camp are almost too perfect. Elrond feels like a pencil sketch in a lush picture-book. But his brother, too, looks weary. These have been long years. 

After a while a bit of small talk forms on his lips. “What do you think they’re going to say to us?” 

Elros grins. “Isn’t it more what we say to them? Remember, it’s our choice.” 

_Your choice_ , Elrond thinks. Elros’s decision was made long ago, pulling him into equal and opposite reaction. Elf by default. Still, he realizes he is smiling back at his brother; if part of it is bitter, part of it is sincere. 

A Vanya attendant, herald to the herald, emerges from the tent before them, like all of their people seeming too bright, burning afterimages as they walk the ground of shaded Beleriand. (Then again, there is little of Beleriand left to burn; some new continent groans into shape.) The Vanya addresses Elros using a Quenya back-formation on his name that neither of them has ever heard before, based on the quirk of unrecognition on his brother’s brow, and turns on a glittering heel back into the tent. Elros shrugs at Elrond, but he straightens his tunic as he stands. 

“Well.” Elros is awkward; nervous, probably has been this whole time. “Good luck.” 

“And to you.” 

They bow to one another. Elros takes a step forward, then hesitates. He looks back over his shoulder. 

“You’ll shave your beard, I suppose?” 

Even in the midst of the world being broken and remade, Elrond has found time to mull over this predicament. The beard itself he has grown indifferent to. It is its absence that is the problem, the creeping five o’clock shadow that marks him as something other than what he seemed to be in the morning. Better to be seen as a Man among Elves than some kind of interloper. None of this is anything he wishes to articulate. 

“You’re stalling, Elros.” 

“Be a shame, really. It’s looking quite nice.” 

Had Elrond something at hand—a pillow, a snowball, a book, weapons from childhood fights—he’d lob it at his brother’s stupid face. But in a split-second, Elros’s smirk shifts to a grave expression. Elrond is reaching for the words to comfort him, but there is too much to say, and too little time, and then the curtain slides back, and Elros is gone.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (update 1/12/21 aka very late-breaking note because I just now reread the calendar appendix in RotK:) Throughout this fic "year" just means...365 day normal human year (or loa/coronar for Elves). Giving Elrond (and myself) a pass on this because at this point he is like under 60 years old or something and therefore has yet to live a full yén (or 144-year long "great year").


	2. Gil-galad

**Gil-galad**

Ereinion Gil-galad—in formal pajamas and various rings, his dark hair woven into a very messy fishtail braid threaded randomly with gold beads—pours honey-colored cordial from a chipped porcelain decanter into delicate crystal cups. 

“How in the world…” the High King of the Noldor exclaims, sliding the refreshment to Elrond across the worn oaken desk (the glass mysteriously sticky), “have we not met?!” 

They are in the King’s platform tent, the canvas sides rolled up; spring air and the quotidian murmur of camp activity surrounding their semi-private meeting. Elrond takes a polite sip of something far too potent to stomach before lunch. 

“It is a pleasure to correct the error, my liege.” 

Gil-galad leans back into his velveteen armchair, seemingly genuinely aghast. “You know I adore your brother—brilliant tactician, exquisitely valiant, of _course_ , and an absolutely villain at the card table—but I’m going to have to send him a very strongly worded letter for hiding you all these years. Once they establish a postal service on that new outpost of his.” The King indicates a vaguely westward direction with his cordial. He shakes his head. “We never even had you for one of the balls!” 

Elrond wants to ask how many balls there could have possibly been during a fifty-year siege, but decides he doesn’t want to know the answer. 

“One must look to the future, I suppose.” 

Gil-galad raises his glass. “The future indeed. The new Age!” He drinks; Elrond feigns to. 

“So,” the King resumes. “I suppose you’ve heard by now that I am building the greatest city in the world.” 

Truth disguised as hyperbole. There are no cities left to compete with, except in Aman, a world unto itself across a now much wider sea. 

“Sounds ambitious,” Elrond says. 

Gil-galad smiles, tenting his jeweled fingers. “This is why we’re going to work well together. You’re not particularly nice, are you?”

Elrond begins to balk, but the King continues. “Elros would give you the shirt off his back, storm a phalanx single-handed, agree to run a kingdom sight-unseen—you’ve more of an instinct for, well,” his lips purse, “self-preservation. Caution. Consideration.” 

“We had, perhaps, different reactions to our childhood experiences,” Elrond says. The understatement of the Age. 

“Yes, you’re both a bit feral, in your own ways. I imagine vintage Fëanorians are a touch less able than wolves as foster-parents.” 

This is not a topic Elrond wants to delve, but he has brought it upon himself. He lets the old urge to defend Maglor slide. Not a cute look; certainly not with the House of Finarfin. But before he can form a politic response, Gil-galad has continued the conversation without him. 

“I myself am somewhat feral,” the King muses. “Stuck on an island most of my youth, surrounded by crusty old nobles…and that poor woman who had to pretend to be my mother.” 

He shakes his head in distaste. Elrond attempts to maintain a neutral facial expression, realizing this discussion might indeed be improved by alcohol; the unresolved scandal around the King’s parentage predates him by several decades, and he is not prepared to offer an opinion on it. 

He wonders when the conversation will turn, finally, to tribute, taxation, warehouse inventories; anything he can speak to without engaging in century-old gossip. 

“You know no one will give me the real story, _still_. If anyone lives to tell the tale. All the father candidates are certainly are quite deceased—may their souls have a swift sojourn in Mandos.” Genuine sadness crosses Gil-galad’s fair face. “I always wanted to get Maedhros’s side of things. Very awkward person to talk to, though. I don’t suppose he ever mentioned anything about _me_?”

Before meeting Gil-galad, Elrond would never have suspected the King of buying into the most sordid speculation of his origins—that he was sired out of wedlock by King Fingon, his mother a scullery maid ensnared in the conspiracy, and that Maedhros, of course, was part of the arrangement, Fingon and Maedhros having been in some sort of arrangement since the days of the Trees. In the course of their very brief acquaintance, it has become evident that Gil-galad is exactly the type of person would who endorse this theory. 

Elrond grasps, at last, his politic response. 

“Maedhros spoke little to me over the course of my childhood, and only in matters of discipline.” He pauses, stirring the golden liquid in the glass. “I have ever known you to be a son of Orodreth. Neither he nor Maglor ever mentioned anything to the contrary.” 

Gil-galad scoffs. “Orodreth. Well, he certainly got stuck holding the bag.” 

“My liege,” Elrond nods deferentially, “were we not discussing matters of a more forward-looking nature? Your city. Your long reign to come, in the second Age of this world.” 

“Ah yes, of course. You’ve reminded me, I did want to circle back to the bit about how you’re really quite condescending and judgmental—please, no need to pull a face, I am making a point here. You probably think you know better than everyone, most of the time. And this,” Gil-galad raps his glass on the desk, “is an element I perceive was dearly lacking in the administration of many of my forebears. Someone saying, _Ought you to challenge the Dark Lord in single combat?_ Might not so many have died at Gondolin if Turgon had been convinced to part with his latest renovation project? I am related to these people in _some_ configuration, whatever it is, so I must have at least as much idiot in me. I therefore need a capable person to tell me when I am being idiotic. I am offering you the job.” 

The summons to Gil-galad’s camp had more or less simply said _Drinks??!!_ , so Elrond is once again caught unawares. 

“While I am grateful for this assessment of my character, may I inquire: what is ‘the job’?” 

“Chief councilor of the kingdom of Lindon, and the city of Forlond,” Gil-galad says. “City-to-be. We would do that, together. Build the city.” 

“Ah,” Elrond does, now, take a draught of the gold stuff, burning a hot stripe down his throat. “You weren’t thinking you might need someone more…experienced?” 

“Experienced!” Gil-galad laughs. “By all accounts _you_ were the one authoring all the actuarial recommendations to the high command—and not just in the eastern regiment. I daresay fifty percent more horses would have fallen into chasms, if not for your keen assessments.” 

This is an exaggeration, but not a terrible one. “Well, perhaps what I meant to say was someone older,” Elrond explains. “Perhaps several millenia older.” 

“My good Lord Elrond.” Gil-galad shakes his head, bemusedly, unaware that this is the first time anyone has used such an honorific for Elrond, who is not the lord of anything—or is he now, the title conferred by the surprise job offer? Does he even _want_ to be Lord of something? “For centuries Beleriandic bureaucracy has been at the mercy of minor nobles whose last original thoughts effervesced ere the rising of the Sun and Moon. They have now all gratefully left the new continent for a chance at reunion with their old mothers.” 

Elrond considers. “You are saying I am a choice of last resort.” 

“Both my last option _and_ my first choice. This is a young world! It needs a young hand to guide it. I am a young king, something no one will let me forget.” 

Gil-galad grows wearied, as he speaks this, for the first time since the beginning of their meeting. Elrond begins to recognize the shape of the burden of the High King, something akin to the shadow of the Oath on the shoulders of the Fëanorians. But the light quickly regains his eyes. 

“Besides, we orphaned princes have to stick together, do we not? So!” He claps. “What do you say?” 

“Well, it’s quite exciting, certainly…” 

“I can see the wheels spinning behind your eyes, Elrond; you think you’re going to be the one who has to do everything. Not so fast! I have already secured an architect. Alendel!” 

The King calls out past Elrond’s shoulder. Shortly the Elf who had greeted Elrond at the tent’s entrance appears from behind the canvas barrier, having presumably had an ear on their entire conversation. Gil-galad smiles. 

“Would you bring up the plans? Ah, thank you.” 

Alendel already seems to have these in hand, placing a large folio between them before joining Gil-galad on his side of the desk, leaning back onto a bookshelf. They’re dressed in deep gray, somewhat slight of build, with the silver-sheened brown hair of certain wood-Elves. 

“A formal introduction: My chief of staff, Alendel of the Tawarwaith. Lord Elrond of the, well, a bit of everything, aren’t you?” 

“Peredhel. Hello.” Elrond stands and bows, wondering if this is overkill as he retakes his seat, but the wood-Elf smizes. 

“Charmed!” Their Sindarin has a slight, lilting accent. “Shall we have a look?” 

Alendel takes the liberty, pulling out a series of maps, building-plans, and free-standing sketches for various columns, archways, doors and fountains. (“Ooh! These are the new ones?” the King murmurs.) 

“Start here.” Alendel slides a blueprint across the desk. It’s of a three-towered building, crescent-shaped, with an open courtyard dotted with pools and fountains. 

“Is it a palace?” he asks. 

“A city hall,” Alendel says. 

“I’ve never lived in a palace and I don’t intend to,” Gil-galad says, poring over sketches of doors with a gold-handled magnifying glass. 

_We’ll see_ , Alendel mouths. 

Elrond smiles. “It’s beautiful. Is the architect…you?” 

“Oh, no.” They shake their head, sending a fetching shimmer down their half-bound hair. “I suppose I’ve had some slight influence on choice of material. The architect is quite open to suggestion.” 

“Alendel will arrange a meeting for you as soon as possible,” the King says distractedly. “Construction will begin before the winter—you’ll make sure it does.” 

Elrond senses that the point at which he could have refused to consent to his new position is long past. This, he supposes, is one of the more benign flourishes of the dread hand of fate, which has lately bandied him about rather aggressively; if stable employment is the denouement, it could be worse. 

“Thank you, my liege. Chief of Staff. When do I begin?” 

“What do you mean, begin? You’ve begun. Alendel, have someone fetch Lord Elrond’s things. Now, what is your opinion on porticos?”

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note about they/them pronouns for Alendel: I used to have an in-line explanation about this, but I've since learned that neither Quenya nor Sindarin actually have gender inflection, and that gender is therefore only marked if someone gets described as "lady," "man," "sister," "daughter," etc. So obviously while I'm using gendered pronouns for most characters, my headcanon is that until an implication of gender is provided (which none will be, for Alendel) "they" is used.


	3. Erestor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought this was a timeline fuck-up BUT I THINK IT ACTUALLY ISN'T: this fic uses the continuity that Celeborn and Galadriel went to Eriador in the very early S.A., rather than Celeborn being a fief lord in Harlindon. So that's why Galadriel and Celeborn aren't present for the events of this fic. (The fucking History of Galadriel and Celeborn is the most confusing thing in all of the HoME, it does not reward trying to be consistent so I am just throwing consistency to the wind.) 
> 
> also, in canon numenor is established in 34 S.A. or something...and this has Elros leaving in, like, 1-2 S.A....so that is a true timeline fuckup, but one I am retaining.

**Erestor**

The war is over, but its aftermath continues to unspool. The camps are filled with refugees, those who kept hidden in the woods or the mountains—everyone driven east who survived. For months, even after Elros leaves with his people on tall white ships—like father, like son—the western shore of Lindon is a jumble of peoples and languages, mortal Men and Women alongside Dwarves dismayed by the drowning of caves and Elves of every wasted realm. 

In this strange period there is a kind of mournful unity between the peoples of Middle-earth—the name has caught on for the remnant continent—though it is punctuated with disharmony that gradually takes prominence. Mistrust, pride, hurt feelings, squabbles over scare resources; the Enemy is vanquished, but his seed ever bears fruit. Elrond thinks of the Third Theme of Ilúvatar: whether the deep and sorrowful tone that drew together the discord intended for the kindred of the world to find commonality or only expressed their unbridgeable divides.

In his more solipsistic moments, he knows his body is some kind of answer to this question, if not one he is capable of interpreting. 

There is, however, a practicality in being a seeming Man among Elves. The remaining mortal tribes, though skeptical of his now-legendary brother, seem more at ease with Elrond than with his elven colleagues, who are equally ill-at-ease with them. The Dwarf-lords compliment him on his beard; whether or not this is in jest is unclear, but it smooths negotiations as they prepare to journey eastward, for the mountains beyond the mountains. Each departing clan or community of every race is furnished with supplies, with as adequate cartography as can be provided—the Eagles, unfortunately, were not available for aerial survey—and with the friendship of the High King of the Noldor in Middle-earth. 

Among their own kind, this is the gift received with most skepticism. The Sindarin princes for whom the glory of Menegroth is a recent memory are uninterested in following the mechanisms of the Noldor into the new Age; they leave in search of eastern forests. Lady Galadriel, daughter of Finarfin and nominally the King’s great-aunt, seems as disbelieving of the Orodreth theory as Gil-galad himself and indifferent to his nascent realm. She and her Sinda husband travel with their household up the River Lhûn, a new name for the broken-open Ascar, its inland stream now a saltwater estuary. There they settle by the shores of a great lake they name Nenuial, Evendim. 

Elrond learns this because after their first and only meeting before being parted for some decades—during which the eminent Galadriel says exceptionally little and her husband (what was his name?) even less, while Elrond natters about dried fruit and sailcloth—anyway, following this cryptically embarrassing outing, he receives what will be the beginning of a large volume of correspondence from the Noldo princess. These detail not only the life and times of their settlement—how many cranes spotted in the marsh one morning, if the leeks at Lindon are doing as well as their crop this season—but long ruminations on the history and failures of the page Age, philosophical inquiries into the nature of the remade world, familial anecdotes, linguistic curios, jokes. 

Elrond realizes that she is providing him with a kind of education. When he asks, gratefully and several missives in, why she has selected him as a pupil, he can hear the gentle laughter in her response: “You seemed lonely.”

Lonely. The word takes him to the middle of the war, and Elros disappearing. If he has been lonely for the past several decades, he has rarely given himself time to feel it. More so now than ever: the early days at Forlond, the new city, once Gil-galad’s remnant make their own short eastward journey to the foothills of the old Ered Luin, are an endless stream of meetings, bricklayers, sculptors, wood-carvers, dowsers, pipe-fitters and glass-cutters lined up outside his tent at all hours. Among the population of Lindon are a good number of these artisans, survivors of Gondolin or Nargothrond who saw better employment opportunities on the horizons of the new world than in the manicured gardens of the old. 

One of them is the city’s architect, an Elf so unassuming that Elrond is not aware of his origins until six months have passed in their collegial relationship. They are visiting a new Dwarven quarry, discerning between various marble varieties, when Erestor sighs, admiring the metalwork on the gilded tea service they have been provided as refreshment. 

“It’s a great shame that Fëanor never had the chance to meet a Dwarf. He would have loved them.” 

Elrond assumes this is a rhetorical observation, if an odd one, but then Erestor shakes his head in disdain. “The bastard.” He downs his tea, turning back to the rock samples. “You know, I think I do like the rose-tinted after all. More interesting.” 

Elrond extracts, over the course of the afternoon, that he is a first cousin of the ill-fated jewel-smith, on the side of Míriel Þerindë. (Erestor uses the thorn, of course, though not in the didactic manner Maglor and Maedhros did.) They grew up together, both studying for a time under Aulë himself—“until, I suppose, I got rather more interested in designing candelabras and he started inventing the alphabet and trying to imbue dead rocks with divine light. Oh, thank you, Timzûl, Noin—we’ll have to do it again sometime!” Erestor bids farewell to their hosts, remounting his horse. 

“The sleigh will arrive next week,” Elrond says. It is winter, the best time to ferry stone over land. He passes a promissory note to the braid-bearded Timzûl, who scrutinizes it with her monocle before waving them on. 

Their horses weave the slow descent down the mountain path. Snowflakes fall sparsely from a sky turning purple. “I hope you’ll take it as a compliment,” Elrond ponders, midsentence, the best way to put this. “I thought you were younger.” 

“Flatterer!” As Elrond stammers, Erestor laughs him off. “No, no, I get that a lot. Not in some years, though. Glad I’ve still my looks.” 

“It’s not—well, it is, of course…” This is becoming unprofessional, more so by the moment. “You just seem…unburdened.” For someone who was at Alqualondë; who crossed the Helcaraxë, if not in the stolen fleet itself. 

(Elrond thinks, as he still often does, of Maglor lamenting on the shore; of whether when this spring comes, he should try to find him. Whether he wants to be found. Erestor is his second cousin. In his face, the dark hair and eyes, Elrond now sees the semblance.)

Erestor hears the unspoken implication. “I know the King values your candor. As do I.” Their horses pick around stones. “I am as burdened as anyone—more than some, less than others. There were many guiltier than I who leapt at the chance for pardon and may be content to live at Eressëa. I could not.” 

They ride in silence; questions form in Elrond’s mind, but ones he cannot find a way to ask. 

“I’d rather keep working,” Erestor says after a time. “And not on an island with a dozen other architects, all competing to design one boathouse. And I like the King, very much. He’s given me a great amount of creative freedom—don’t get me started on the Gondolin building codes. I feel badly I took him at first for a little vapid.” 

“He does have a way of convincing you,” Elrond says. 

“He’s very young. Unburdened, as you say; that is well. The first of his line to have clean hands, except dear Finwë.” The sudden revelation of Erestor’s intimacy with that period of history continues to startle. “And canny with his staffing choices. I doubt as many of our mariners would have signed on without you at the helm.” 

Lesser than the Noldor but still numerous in Forlond is a community of nautically-inclined Sindar, establishing the port and building ships, although more of their number have retreated further into the Gulf of Lune with Círdan, to his new Havens. But these are the people among whom Gil-galad grew up at the Havens of Falas and later on Balar, and their allegiance is to the King—more trusting than their woodland kin. 

“I doubt I had any influence.” Elrond resents, a bit, being told he is merely an earthly symbol of Eärendil, or an heir of Dior Eluchíl. He is no mariner or Sinda prince. That part of his upbringing was taken away from him. 

“You count yourself among the Noldor,” Erestor guesses, and when Elrond doesn’t respond— annoyed with the half-truth of this, unable to find coherence in the complicated feelings it arises—makes it worse: “You might reconsider that, someday. I would if I had the choice to.” 

The snow is falling faster; Elrond changes the subject to their journey home, whether certain routes will be passable, if the river might freeze over by next week in time to bear the sleigh. If Erestor knows he has touched a nerve he doesn’t acknowledge it, and when they part at the city gate, hours later, Elrond feels badly about his hesitance—he had, after all, asked his own series of probing questions—and then annoyed again. 

He realizes he is freezing and exhausted, and hungry. (Among elves, he has always been the first to hunger, as if the mortal part of him burns faster and requires more fuel.) In his tent— they’re still in the blasted tents, the foundations of Erestor’s buildings risen with scaffolding, whistling in the wind—he makes a meal out of waybread and peppered herring and falls dead asleep in his riding cloak. 

So pass the days. 

Elrond prefers not to dwell on what political convenience Gil-galad saw in his appointment. If he were a different person (as if Elrond has not intimately known his whole life an alternate version of himself, now far sundered across the sea) he can imagine how such a person might take advantage of the situation. In Middle-earth, he is the last living descendent of both Thingol and Turgon. Such a person might persuade the remnant of Doriath and Gondolin to follow him; might grapple for control of an Elf kingdom to match his brother’s kingdom of Men. 

It is not lost on Elrond that in inviting him to his camp that day, the High King was charmingly neutralizing someone he saw as a threat. But Elrond has never seen himself as that; nor, fortunately, does he aspire to. 

Any opportunity to define what he is not is soothing to him; it distracts from the interminable, internal debate over what he _is_. The confused lineage—by blood and by adoption—of Sinda and Noldo would be enough on its own; that he is the legacy of both the kin-slayers and slain. Yet the body that houses this rather Eldarin conundrum rarely acts like it belongs to one of the Eldar; it has a mortal’s frailty, a mortal’s flaws. Fatigue, hunger, exceptionally persistent facial hair. 

Elrond has become grateful for the companionship of Alendel, both when they are working (which is usually) and in the rare moments when they are not. This is not only because the wood-Elf remains calm in the face of some of the more disastrous moments in the early kingdom, because they can interpret Gil-galad’s oft-contradictory whims—nor even because they are fine singer, in meters and modes Elrond has never heard before, and an expert forager of wild plants, and they have a nice smile, and shiny hair, and…no, Elrond has retained the utmost professionalism at all times. 

But if he has an attraction, in the most neutral sense of the word, to Alendel and their people, it is because for the Tawarwaith questions of ancestry are hybrid by nature; they carry less baggage. _Tawarwaith_ is the term Gil-galad uses for them, forest people, and while their kind accept this nomenclature in public it is not what they use among themselves. They are the mingled descendants of the Avari and Nandor, categories imposed by an archaic Valinorean worldview that do little to represent hundreds of clans who wandered Beleriand for an Age before the Exiles crossed the water and the ice. This scattered realm is lost—was long ago, in centuries of conflict, in retreat to deeper and more dangerous woods, avoiding the Noldor and the unrest that followed them, or assimilation into Doriath. Of those who survived the war, the greater part go with the Sindarin princes; the community that stays in Lindon is small, and most of them are young. Yet of all the people of Forlond their understanding of this new land is most instinctual. It is not new to them, for they remember grandmothers and uncles and cousins who ventured this far into the east of the old world. They are invaluable surveyors and agricultural planners, and without them, the newborn city might not have survived its earliest days. The King, nor the Chief Councilor, would certainly have no survived without the Chief of Staff. 

Alendel’s prominence in Gil-galad’s administration, too, then, has its political mechanism. The Noldor of the past age failed Beleriand, although many among them fought against the doomful tide. If their High King in Middle-earth catered only to his own kind, his would be a feeble kingdom. And so he is braiding together a new people. 

But Elrond feels too hybrid, even for this bold experiment. He is never sure who he sees in the mirror: the beard is his brother’s, as a younger man; the braids are Maglor’s, pulled into place by harpist’s hands. 

(If Elwing and Eärendil are present in his face he cannot remember in what combination.) 

The Choice was definitive, solemn, sworn to a power beyond the realm of comprehension. But now that he has chosen, he sees no consequence. His body and mind continue as they always have, confused, driven to distraction in endless work. Exhausted. Disconnected. And though even in the hardship of the first years at Forlond there are times of great happiness, at the end of the day, he feels at times a greater emptiness than in the heart of the war, when all the world was in grave peril. 

Brick by brick and beam by beam, he is helping to lay the foundation and scaffolding for the future of the Eldar in Middle-earth. But the truth is that Elrond cannot see a future for himself. There is only a distant fog, the ether into which his brother and parents—all three of them—have disappeared. He can only guess this is what is coming for him as well.

###


	4. Alendel

**Alendel**

Gil-galad’s great talent as a ruler is enthusiasm. His office, now in a temporary wooden cabin leaky to the chill spring air, is piled with project proposals. Every citizen of Forlond seems to have an idea for improving upon a city that barely exists yet—nearly all of which the High King joyfully accepts before passing them to Elrond to politely reject. 

They have been debating the merits of an overly complex aquacultural complex for the harbor, and Elrond is arriving at the point that _perhaps_ my Liege was swayed by the fresh oysters that accompanied its presentation, when Gil-galad’s gaze suddenly falls. 

“What?” Elrond stops, wondering if he got remoulade on his lapel. 

“You know, some days I rather wonder what the bottom half of your face looks like.” The King cups his own smooth chin. “Círdan himself would envy that beard. And he’s had since time immemorial to grow his.” 

Elrond should have enough of a sense of job security by now to tell the King when he is being a twat. But before he can rewire his circuits of civility, Gil-galad turns to Alendel, who based on their continued notetaking has not elected to strike this digression from the record. 

“What do you think, Alendel? Should I order our Chief Councilor to shave, just to assuage my curiosity?” 

“I like Lord Elrond’s beard.” Alendel shrugs. 

(Elrond feels a forceful blush and is at least grateful for its partial concealment.) 

“Indeed,” the King’s eyes narrow. “But does Lord Elrond like _his_ beard?” 

Elrond refuses to engage in this provocation. “I hardly see how the subject is relevant—” 

“Why don’t you give it a go? Spring is upon us, new season, new fashions. _I_ might go blonde.” 

“Let it be known that I advise strongly against this,” says Alendel, still dutifully recording. 

“Mightn’t you be a bit more…” Gil-galad searches for the word. “ _Comfortable_?” He’s not wrong, and he knows he isn’t, and Elrond is all the more infuriated. “Haven’t you ever…” 

“Of _course_ I have. And I look ridiculous.” 

“I doubt that.” 

“I look passably like an Elf in the morning, but by the end of the day I _very clearly have a beard_. Not in an ancient and venerable way.” 

“Elrond, is this all about a bit of stubble?” 

“I don’t _like_ how it looks. I’d rather just _have_ the damn beard. I don’t like being…in-between.” This admission feels childish—he can’t stand the subtle sympathies that pass over Alendel’s and Gil-galad’s faces. “And you’d absolutely be the first to snicker when my moustache shaded in by lunchtime.” 

“Snicker!” Gil-galad is incredulous. “Alendel, would I snicker?” 

“You have been known to, my Liege.” The Chief of Staff puts down their quill, meeting the King’s gaze. “Ought we to return to our agenda? The hour grows late.” 

The hour has, and it is later still when Alendel and Elrond take leave of the King, out into the damp night. Elrond accepts a lantern from the sentinel keeping guard and together they make their way down the muddy avenue of tents. The city is perpetually on the brink of habitability, the still-thawing ground hindering the pipe-works, Gil-galad’s perfectionist and yet fleeting attention to various minute details-of-the-week—cantilevers, cobblestones, earthquake preparedness, dragon-proofing—impeding efficient project management. Its impending completion seems ever more distant the closer they approach. 

“I can’t imagine what it will be like, sleeping within four solid walls.” Elrond sighs, gaping into a yawn. He hasn’t lived in anything other than a tent in decades; none of them have. 

“Elrond,” Alendel takes the lantern, gently. “May I return to the subject of the beard?” 

“Oh, Elbereth and all her stars, what is it about the damned beard?” 

He immediately regrets his temper, but Alendel remains unfazed. “The King was being an ass, but he’s right. You don’t like it.” 

Elrond kicks at a clod of earth. “What I like has no bearing on the matter. My body insists on having a beard, so I have one.” 

“Have you not thought about changing your body?” 

Their shared halo of lamplight rocks in the wind. 

Elrond has no idea what that is supposed to mean. He feels badly enough already for being short with the Chief of Staff, wants to get to his tent and bed before all his self-loathing curdles over. 

He is beginning to form a sentence articulating these objections, but Alendel doesn’t let him. 

“There are ways,” they continue. “It’s such a simple thing, really, a beard. But it’s more than the beard, isn’t it?” 

Alendel stops; they’ve come to their tent. Passing the lamp back to Elrond, they reach for his face, palm to cheek. 

Elrond holds back a flinch, at first, then a swoon, as Alendel holds his gaze. For a long moment he lets them, trying not to tremble, to let the overwhelm of touch unlock the cage of his heart, the great, maudlin tide of it, liquid and uncontainable. 

He is, at his core, too desperate for love; he knows he will accept it from the wrong places. 

Elrond looks down, away, and gently lowers their hand. Fleetingly, their fingers remain intertwined, until Alendel pulls away. 

“Good night, Chief of Staff,” Elrond manages. 

“Good night, Chief Councilor.” 

Elrond watches them slip behind the canvas.

###

Alendel greets Elrond the next morning as if nothing has passed between them; respecting, he knows, the boundary he has set. With his mind, if not with his heart. Their stable working relationship seems too valuable to the future city—to the future kingdom—to risk on a crush, even a mutual one. Perhaps that is what _makes_ them work so well together, after all. Something in Elrond would rather stay there, and Alendel seems to understand.

And whatever they meant by _changing your body_ , it seems Alendel has deemed Elrond not prepared for the second half of that conversation, either. Elrond does think about asking, in the daily moments when he is forced to remember he has a body, and that said body is insufficient for the purposes of working all hours of the day and night besides beautiful people who never tire, rarely hunger, and certainly never break out in stress rashes, get ingrown hairs on their cheeks, or wake up with ink-stains on their chemises after they pass out on a pile of census forms. His body is uncontrollable; how could it be changed? 

How would Alendel know, anyway, having lived centuries at the peak of physical beauty and vigor? 

Yet the warm days are increasing in number, and Elrond has less and less time to turn this conversation over in his mind. Construction speeds up; soon the towers and halls and gardens and fountains that existed only in Erestor’s blueprints are as solid and real as any city of old. 

And then one morning in the early summer, like a dream, the city is ready to be lived in, and though it is Elrond coordinating the residential process for once he has barely any work to do at all, as the people of Forlond hang their banners and string their garlands of flowers. Wine is un-casqued, cordials decanted, harps strung. 

Elrond realizes that during his brief lifetime, and indeed for decades still before, no one has been able to have a particularly good time. 

Gil-galad, the self-styled social director of the War of Wrath, evolves into a greater party animal than ever could have been anticipated. His “city hall”—where he keeps his primary residence, in apartments bedecked tastefully with Dwarven silver, obligatory tapestries of recent ancestors and multiple decorative carp ponds—transitions seamlessly from a venue for municipal hearings and council meetings to the beating heart of Forlond nightife. Every evening brings a new salon, singing contest, dance performance, clothing-optional poetry reading. (Elrond does not attend, but the rumors have some truth to them.) 

The celebration stretches into weeks, months, the whole summer an endless release after years of dim uncertainty. And in spite of the decadence, the city is _working_. The High King, no longer driven to anxiety by the construction process, is attentive and proactive, heeding the counsel of his advisory team. Supply chain problems are solved, disputes settled between neighbors, fountain-drains cleansed of sparkling wine and strawberries. 

Indeed, if there is a major concern of the era, it is that the people of Forlond are enjoying themselves a tad much. By late summer, a surprising number of petitions for divorce have crossed Elrond’s desk, an issue he has absolutely no ability to speak to, apart from his understanding that it is insurmountably illegal in the eyes of both the law and the Valar. 

“Interesting.” The High King’s paces on rose-tinted marble resound through the council chamber. He wears an elaborate silver diadem-slash-hairpiece, newly forged by Celebrimbor, son of Curufin, who had appeared with a remnant of his people from somewhere in the mountains during a mid-winter thaw. (“My cousin, one way or another—sort of yours as well, isn’t he?” Gil-galad had explained to Elrond—unnerved, at first, by the appearance of the last living Fëanorian. But ‘Brimbor turned out to be a good-natured, generous fellow, much to the King’s embarrassment, and is at this very moment sitting on the council, with his charmingly unstylish blacksmith’s blunt haircut.) 

“And these bonds were…consummated? In the solemn and sacred sense?” 

The King does a surprisingly good job keeping a straight face. Elrond is mortified, before the assembled host of Noldo and Sinda elders newly appointed to the council—and more importantly Alendel, who smiles amusedly from their recording-desk. 

“I don’t think anyone got into specifics,” he manages. 

“The law is very clear on this matter,” says Inniel, a formidable Sinda lady whose elaborate braid-work Elrond often takes note of. 

“As is the divine purview,” offers Erestor, who now that he has finished with the architecture continues to display surprising areas of expertise. “One will be ever shunned by the Valar should one step outside the holy bounds of the so-called heterosexual union, once said union is eternally and solemnly bound. We all used to have rather a few methods of getting around that, didn’t we?” 

Nods of assent circle the room. Elrond is reminded of how much younger he is than everyone else, wanting, just a little bit, to die. 

“So I am told,” the King modestly professes, while still managing to imply he is more than familiar with some of these methods. “But many of our people are of my upstart generation. It may be there is less awareness of the grave consequences of the sacred act.” His contemplative gaze rests on a stained-glass group portrait, depicting, with Gil-galadian optimism, a subdued gathering of his Finwëan predecessors, each of them a grave consequence of the sacred act. 

The King turns around on a heel. “Or indeed of its _wide_ variety of alternatives. As for the marriages in question, we must do all we can to support and succor them, that they may someday come to thrive in the bliss of eternal bondage.” 

Everyone murmurs acknowledgements re: the sanctity of marriage. Elrond catches a near-imperceptible eyeroll crossing Alendel’s fair face. 

“But as for the remainder of the population, perhaps as a preventative measure,” the King continues, “well, dare I say, _prophylactic_ —”

“They want me to write the sexual education campaign.” A half hour later Elrond slams his dossier on the picnic table where Alendel is taking their lunchbreak. 

“The Eldarin capacity for sanctimonious horseshit continues to confound.” Alendel shakes their head, slicing pickled beetroot and nut pâté. “You know that our so-called ‘primitive’ tribes were issuing divorces a thousand years ago. No matter the genitals involved in the marriage, which is altogether another issue, by the way. All that pretense for the Valar. Thank goodness we don’t have to model our relationship patterns on your joyless pantheon. Our gods are _fun_.” 

“Alendel,” Elrond takes a seat, blanching, unable to quell the lapse of professionalism about to burst forth, given how professionally relevant the matter has become. “I’ve, well—I’ve never…” Even in a whisper, he can’t bring himself to complete the sentence. 

“Darling,” Alendel puts down the knife, gazing upon Elrond with their seawater-green eyes as if he is the simplest elfling in the schoolhouse. “Isn’t this the perfect opportunity for you to learn how?” 

Elrond knows—and Alendel as well, assuredly—exactly how he would like to learn. To survive this moment, he summons to mind the boil-blotted face of a troll who once broke into the eastern regiment’s accounting department. 

“You can just _talk_ to people, you know. Make it a purely academic exercise!” Alendel exclaims, perhaps in reaction to the look on Elrond’s face. “Those old Noldos _love_ talking about their sex lives, once you get past all the euphemisms.” They shudder. “And the Sindar, well, they’ll draw you diagrams.” 

“What about the Tawarwaith?” The question slips off Elrond’s tongue before he can stop it. 

Alendel laughs into their sandwich, holding up a finger as they chew. “ _We_ ,” they say after recovering, “are _not_ the target audience for this campaign.” In reaction to some new and uncontrollable pitiable expression, their face softens. “I can tell you all about it when I get back.” 

Alendel is soon taking a well-deserved leave of absence of indefinite length, to visit cousins settled in the eastern wood. This is something Elrond keeps conveniently forgetting, as it fills him with no small amount of self-indulgent, petulant despair. 

“When you come back. Of course. I mean—no. Definitely not. I didn’t mean to intrude. On your lunch. Good day, Chief of Staff.” 

He gathers his skirts, bows urgently and continues at a brisk pace down the colonnade. 

“Oh, Elrond!” Alendel calls. “You’ve left all your paperwork!”

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (See note at beginning of next chapter for explanation that I wrote this half of the fic in a feral state outside of contemporary Silm fandom and had no idea that Tyelpe is Celebrimbor's common diminutive, hence the slightly doofy 'Brimbor.)


	5. Celebrimbor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for drug use. I know pipe-weed is canonically a Númenórean thing, and therefore not yet on the scene in Lindon, but if that's supposed to be tobacco (which it canonically is) Celembrimbor's stash is definitely a cannabis varietal. Party on!!!!
> 
> Also note about Celebrimbor in general: I wrote this half of the fic under a rock/in a total vacuum of contemporary Silmarillion fandom customs; I have since learned that everyone else in the world uses Tyelpe as Celebrimbor's diminutive; in my feral, fratty wife-guy characterization I'm sticking to 'Brimbor, possibly justified by the fact at this stage of life he's 100% anti-Feanorian and going only by his Sindarin name.

**Celebrimbor**

Alendel is, of course, right. The research is almost too easy to conduct, once he gets behind closed doors with polite letters of inquiry bearing the High King’s seal—Gil-galad being almost too delighted to dispatch Elrond on this errand. 

The same-gender-loving population is the first to respond with enthusiasm. (“Shouldn’t we just call the whole thing ‘Have You Considered Gay Sex?’” the King helpfully suggests.) Erestor, once again, reveals new dimensions of his vast experience. Elrond manages to disassociate for only about half of their interview, his soul floating somewhere in the rafters. It only tumbles back down to embodiment when Erestor reveals that, after a lifetime rich with these many and varied exploits, he has been completely abstinent (!) since his husband (!!) was killed single-handedly slaying a Balrog (!!!) following the sack of Gondolin. 

Elrond puts a pin in the term _husband_ , knowing it cannot have held legal meaning but still wondering at its implication, and manages to express sincere condolences. Erestor accepts these gracefully but downs his wine. 

“Really, an _incredibly_ dramatic thing to do.” He tops off both his and Elrond’s glasses, scoffing. “And his _best friend_ had just gotten himself smitten days before doing the same exact thing! Idiots.” 

“If not for their valiance…” Elrond begins. 

“You can slay a Balrog with two people—or more!—and not die.” Erestor slams the bottle down. “It _is_ allowed.” 

Lady Inniel is likewise a trove of information. She and her “companion this last Age and well before,” Lady Serinwen, ply him with biscuits and weird home-fermented beverages and stories about the “scene” in Menegroth. Elrond leaves with a new understanding of female anatomy, half a lemon-cake and a set of hand-me-down hair-combs (“We were just thinning out our collection!”). 

The ladies apparently also inform Galadriel of the project; her next missive includes, to Elrond’s horror, an unprompted personal recipe for some kind of herbal lubricant. 

Yet the audience Elrond most needs to reach does not necessarily stand to benefit from these many insights. Heterosexual couples, after all, are considerably more likely to find themselves in accidental marriages. 

Not having many other options in this area, he finds himself calling on Celebrimbor, whose marriage seems to have been quite intentional; together, he and his Sinda wife, Erenwen, are the most affectionate couple he has ever seen in person. Elrond finds himself relating to their russet-headed teenage daughters—twins!—who retch at Erenwen’s lingering touch on her husband’s substantial bicep while they take tea in the parlor and slink away like cats the second they have leave to. 

(Elrond supposes it is possible this dredges up sublimated memories of Elwing and Eärendil, so famously into each other they abandoned earthly existence.)

“The twins were born during the war?” he asks as Celebrimbor leads him down to the smithy, which Gil-galad gladly furnished once he realized that his paranoid fantasies about a Fëanorian-loyalist coup had no basis in reality. ‘Brimbor bears little love for his father—or grandfather, for that matter—and seems to care about his wife, his little girls, inventing new alloys and smoking fine Dwarven pipe-weed. In that order. 

“Not long into it.” Almost as soon as Elrond has followed him across the sweltering threshold, his host pulls off his shirt and lights a pipe with a red-hot iron poker, offering it up once he’s taken a long pull. His exhale comes in perfect concentric rings. “Not the best timing, but ‘Wen was still raiding orc camps ‘til she was about ten months in. Very awesome. Very, very erotic, honestly.” 

Seated on a bench that _could_ be a little further from the furnace, Elrond is already busy having a coughing fit and calculating that likelihood that he is only a scant few years older than the skulking, half-grown twins. This final remark, and the unexpected hit of the smoke, knock his mind into a blank slate. 

It is a while before he can remember what he is doing there, the dry heat working its way down his collar and up his cuffs. 

‘Brimbor doesn’t seem to mind the silence. Pipe between his teeth—he takes it back, gently, from Elrond’s stunned hand—he works the fire with a bellows. The heat is full of sound—a murmured crackling, metallic plinks and plonks—and golden light, overwhelming to the senses. Yet in the smith’s hands it is steady, controlled. Sure. Elrond has always imagined Fëanor laboring in a fevered half-delirium, his terrible, fey genius surfacing in explosive bursts. Watching his grandson work, he thinks that even in fashioning the Silmarilli there must have been a great many stretches of this quiet tedium. 

Or perhaps this is why ‘Brimbor favors the Dwarf-leaf: to keep the madness at bay. 

“There we are.” The smith shifts forward with tongs, lifting something out the fire and into a waiting water-cistern, where it steams on contact. 

After a minute or two ‘Brimbor holds up a small metal object. “I made one of these for your brother, not so long ago,” he says. “Kept the mold, thinking I might run into you sometime. Here, it won’t burn you.” 

Elrond catches the trinket, still faintly warm. 

It’s a brooch. Of a boat, impeccably rendered in palm-size, and a great bird crossing upward across its starboard bow. A fantasy, a funny story about his parents, a world-historical, indisputable fact. Every tiny, unbelievable detail depicted with frightening, miniature accuracy. The kitsch weighs heavily in Elrond’s hands. 

“Where’s the Silmaril?” he asks instead of saying “thank you,” because he is now a little bit high. 

‘Brimbor closes the furnace. “I don’t do jewels unless I have to.” 

“I see.” 

‘Brimbor splashes his hands and face in the water, slowly wiping them on a towel as Elrond continues to stare at the unexpected gift. Was its twin pinned to Elros’s cloak, the last time he saw him? It’s quite to his taste, after all. 

The smith sits down beside him, glistening with sweat. ‘Brimbor is—there’s no other word for it — _ripped_. It’s almost a little weird. His uncle Maedhros, who even in his diminished years still towers over Elrond’s memory, seems positively slender in comparison. 

_Could_ I _pull off nipple piercings?_ Elrond wonders. 

He is perhaps higher than anticipated. 

“You know I’m sorry you had to get dragged into it.” ‘Brimbor re-lights the pipe with a candle, offering it again; Elrond takes it, just to be polite, and fares a little better on the intake. 

“Dragged into— _cough_ —dragged into what?” 

“The family. The Oath. All the horror. You were just children.” 

“Oh, that.” Elrond passes back the pipe, undoing the first few buttons of his tunic. “You know, actually, they _did_ quite literally drag us out of the woods. Like kittens in a sack.” He starts laughing, which makes him cough again, which makes him laugh more. 

Celebrimbor doesn’t seem to think any of this is funny, his big, handsome face molding into the same pitiable expression Elrond has encountered on that of countless Elves. It is far easier to stare at ‘Brimbor’s pecs than it is to meet this probing, brown-eyed gaze, the solemn tenderness in it. 

Elrond recovers. “To their credit, Maglor did not leave us to die in the wilderness, and Maedhros tolerated the decision.” 

There is more to their credit than this, he knows, but how much more? 

At least someone raised him. Elrond lifts the little ship skyward in what feels, in the moment, like a very potent gesture. Flying away. 

‘Brimbor turns over his left arm, showing a twisted, puckered wound between the elbow and wrist. 

“Curufin’s parting gift to his son,” he says. (The reluctance to use the word “father”; this Elrond knows well.) “In the small hours before they were to be banished from Nargothrond, he came to me. Thought I’d be joining him in exile. That I, too, was bound.” 

“Did he compel you by force?” 

‘Brimbor shakes his head. “This wound he gave me in self-defense. I grappled him to the floor of the smithy the moment he’d weaseled his way through the door, with his talk of blood fealty. Might have killed him, if he hadn’t slipped out of my hands.”

‘Brimbor stares into the distance, some invisible scene playing out before him: jaw set, kind eyes flaring with sudden rage. Then he takes another pull from the pipe; Elrond watches him sink back into his body. 

“But he scrambled up and stuck me with my own tongs. Hot from the fire.” He runs his thumb over the wound. “Perhaps I let him. Else I would have been made a kinslayer, too.” 

‘Brimbor must have been just a boy at the time of Alqualondë, terrified and confused. Powerless. 

“Perhaps he didn’t want that for you.” Elrond is surprised to have said this, but he has. 

The silence that follows takes on a physical heft, like a stone wall being laid between them. 

“They were all of them monsters,” ‘Brimbor says after a time. “Wraiths, by the end. And _you_ ,” he laughs, “you had the worst of them. The younger five were the followers. Maedhros let his pride lead him. His fealty. And Maglor…” He scoffs. “Maglor knew better and he went along with it. Spent the rest of the age wringing his hands, but that didn’t stop Doriath. That didn’t stop Sirion.” 

‘Brimbor is looking at him, meaningfully, but now Elrond is possessed of his own vision. With eerie, stoned clarity, he is remembering the lullabies, the movement of long fingers across strings. 

Yet the memory is not his own: there is another child there, a brown-eyed, hyperactive child refusing to go to sleep, aware of the adults talking at the party downstairs. Starving for the attention. 

Not a memory: something he can see as if through a window. 

Strange. 

“Maglor might have been the worst of them all.” Smoke curls from ‘Brimbor’s nostrils. 

The dream-window is shuttering, its music fading, the light of a long-ago age winking out. 

“Perhaps you’re right,” Elrond says. The little ship is damp in his palm now; he slips it into his pocket. 

‘Brimbor startles him with a clap on the shoulder. 

“We’re _better_.” 

He hops up, holds out a calloused hand. Elrond accepts and is swept to his feet, and into a crushing embrace. “We’ll do better with this age.” 

“Of course,” Elrond manages, those his lungs are in a vise. 

“Now!” His host breaks away, striding down the hall and throwing open a door onto some kind of courtyard. “Out of the sweatbox. We’ll have wine in the garden, now that we’ve formally received you and all. What was it you wanted to talk about?” 

“Oh.” Elrond laughs, having nearly forgotten. He follows ‘Brimbor to the door in a daze. “Well. That would be non-procreative sex.” 

“Ah, yes. For the public edification.” The sweaty, shirtless, erstwhile Fëanorian throws his head back, bellowing up to the house. “‘Wen, my love, would you bring down your cocks?” 

Somewhere, the twins shriek in embarrassment.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My favorite thing about this chapter = Elrond dresses like an old lesbian because he gets all his fashion inspiration from old lesbians. I have fun.


	6. Erestor, Again

**Erestor, Again**

Elrond’s notes are copious, detailed, and only occasionally incomprehensible—each of his interview subjects having had a tendency to draw him into some state of intoxication. It takes him the better part of a month to sort through it all, and another to produce the initial drafts. 

Erestor more or less insists on providing illustrations, a prospect that terrifies Elrond until he looks over the sketches (with his hands over his eyes, at first) and finds that they are not anatomically gratuitous, but stylized, informative, and actually rather funny. They may educate the public after all. 

Now feeling co-ownership of the project, Erestor becomes de facto editor as well. His annoying mark-ups of the occasional, inadvertent Quenyaisms scattered throughout the text will be forever bored in Elrond’s mind. 

(“Have you really been going around thinking this was a viable approach to sentence construction?” 

“Erestor, Maglor taught me to write formal Sindarin. I think it’s possible that his thoughts were elsewhere the day we did the ablative absolute.” 

“I cannot think of a worse excuse. Your own _great-great-grandfather_ would have thrown you in the dungeons of Menegroth over this sentence.”) 

Elrond sends a copy of the finished manuscript to Galadriel, bound under the title “Rice Harvest Outlook on the Upper Lhûn: A Forecast for S.A. 3-7” to avert the prying eyes of letter-carriers. It comes back unmarked, with a short note of congratulation, _although our community has a possibly more instinctive understanding of such matters, and so will not be needing to refer to this charming leaflet._

He thinks of forwarding it to Alendel as well—they’re still away—but decides against it. No reason to bother them with workplace-related matters. 

“‘Elf Awareness: Your Discreet Guide Covering Non-Nuptial Alternatives to the Sacred Act.’ Fantastic!” Gil-galad slaps the finished product on the table, pouring out another unwanted draught of blackberry brandy. 

Elrond takes it out of politeness; the King is very proud of his latest distillation project. “You don’t find title a bit stupid? Started as a joke, but I’m afraid it ended up sticking.” 

It’s after dinner, late fall; a subdued evening, with fireplaces roaring and music playing somewhere, but the guests mostly are gathered in small conversations, sitting on balcony ledges or huddled under wool blankets. 

“Of course it’s stupid! But we need people’s attention, not their respect. Laswiniel will see that it gets into hands of every last virgin in the kingdom.” 

Elrond nods in solidarity with the kingdom’s virgins as the High King kisses the hand of the Elf seated beside him, a statuesque blonde in dark blue. Gil-galad had introduced Laswiniel some weeks ago as a publicity consultant, after which it became very clear she was also on the fast track to become royal consort. She smiles and raises her glass. 

“You’re about to become indispensable, Lord Elrond.” 

“Elrond already _is_ indispensable. To me! But now you’ll be on everyone’s nightstand!” 

Gil-galad is inordinately pleased with himself. If this is in some part a slightly perverse pleasure in making his Chief Councilor squirm, as he did at first—Elrond doesn’t count it out—it is in equal measure pride. 

Elrond is proud of himself, too, most of all for becoming even marginally conversant on matters of Elven sexuality. Some distant, hypothetical day, he may even put that knowledge to use. 

“Well, it wouldn’t have been anything without Erestor’s drawings,” he says.

“Oh, they’re charming,” says Laswiniel. “I’m going to have a whole batch of prints made.” 

“How exciting!” 

(Elrond does not realize this is the legacy of the project that will most haunt him: every Eldarin household in Middle-earth having a framed poster of non-procreative sex positions, as catalogued by him before his centenary, hanging in their powder room.) 

The King drains his glass. “Where is the old widow, anyway? In one of his moods?” 

“I suppose,” says Elrond. It has become clear that, in order to maintain an even-keeled public persona, Erestor is required to spend days at a time—or weeks—shut in his rooms alone. He always emerges intact; however, attempts to retrieve him prematurely are not met with success. 

“Can’t you go get him, Elrond? I’m longing for his jaded assessment of my new vintage.” 

“I was about to turn in anyway.” Elrond rises, bowing. “I’ll leave a bottle outside his door.” 

“How it is,” Gil-galad groans, curling backward, halfway into Laswiniel’s lap, “the two most abstinent minds of the Age managed to produce a work so instructively _filthy_ …” 

Downstairs in the kitchens, Elrond assembles a basket of apples, goat cheese, smoked fish and rice-bread, with a small decanter of the King’s brandy—only after the head chef, who’s always insisting he looks too thin, watches him eat a substantial slice of persimmon spice cake. He walks out into the cold moonlit streets, which this time last year had only been muddy paths, slowly winding his way; no reason to rush an unscheduled house-call. 

He’s lowering the care package to Erestor’s front stoop when Elrond hears the balcony door open above. He waves awkwardly, as the shadowed figure walks out; perhaps aware of his presence but not able to respond to it. 

Elrond remembers long fugues like this from his childhood, when he and Elros seemed to be the only creatures of flesh and blood walking the shabby halls of the Fëanorians. Then they made him afraid, or angry. As he got older, he began to feel more pity, parallel to his brother’s disgust. 

_You count yourself among the Noldor_ , Erestor said to him a winter ago. _You might reconsider that, someday. I would if I had the choice to._

“Goodnight, then,” Elrond says, breath curling on the air. He knows he won’t get a response, but still waits a moment, wishing his friend’s voice would break the silence, before he slowly starts on his way home.

###


	7. Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW for drug use, and what can only be described a "bad trip." 
> 
> Also, this was mentioned at top of fic but bears repeating: I think in canon Númenor was not formally established until S.A. 34 or something; I have obviously WAYYY sped up that timeline, since at this point we're in approximately S.A. 2-3. or something. next time I write an ambitious multichapter fic I WILL look at the official timelines first, but here we are.

**Alone**

Alendel has sent word they’ll be returning soon, and after seeing to it that the kingdom won’t collapse in the three-day span when neither Chief of Staff nor Chief Councilor will be present, Elrond decides to take a short vacation of his own. 

“But you really ought to wait until the spring.” Gil-galad calls from his paper-strewn chaise-lounge, the day Elrond is making final arrangements. “You could drop in on your brother! We’ll arrange a ship.” 

“I don’t think one just ‘drops in’ on Númenor,” Elrond says, moving the King’s detritus into various piles that he knows will be scattered to the wind the moment he walks out. “And that would be rather more than a week’s voyage.” 

He’s received a single letter from his brother in two years, written during the early days after his arrival on the new contient and received more than ten months afterward, after the Númenórean fleet was able to spare a ship to carry the post. It had been short and rather impersonal, mostly updates on geography, which annoyed Elrond until he got to the bit about how many people had sickened with scurvy, or died, and the hunger in the winter to come. 

Elros had chosen mortality: there was something newly terrifying about the reality of this, and Elrond had not been sure what to say. So he’d scribbled off some nonsense, exaggerating the challenges of city planning from his warm and furnished tent, and ending with a casual offer to ask his new employer, the High King of the Noldor ( _an old acquaintance of yours!_ ), to send aid as needed. A personal reply never came. Soon a new fleet of Númenórean trade ships started making appearances in the Forlond harbor, and even in this moment a bowl of wild Númenórean apples is sitting on the King’s tea tray. Elrond has handled countless official documents bearing the seal of Elros Tar-Minyatur, and moreover been gawked at by various Númenórean mariners stunned to see their King’s semblance in a weedy, bearded quasi-Elf. He is confident that his brother is thriving, and he imagines he’s too busy for visitors. 

“Why only a week? Take a year! Alendel’s been gone a whole season, haven’t they? It’s not like I’m going to fire you.” 

“I know _that._ I wouldn’t let you.” 

“You just can’t stand the idea of not working.” Dramatically, the King pours Elrond a cup of tea. “Please just don’t freeze to death on me. The absolute least you can do.” 

He is thinking of this conversation three days later, when he wakes up in his woodland bivouac with drool icicled in his beard-crevices. Cold blue dawn is breaking through the tree branches above him; this is a young-ish birch forest, its growth somehow sheltered from the cataclysms of war. 

Elrond works the blood back into his hands as he builds the morning’s fire. He is freezing, but he can remember unhappier and colder nights in more sheltered places. He wonders, and dismisses in the same thought, whether something in his blood is changed, the stronger Elven stock overtaking the mortal. Then he sneezes directly onto his bowl of porridge. 

By the time breakfast is remade and the camp packed, the sun is a little higher than he’d like it. The coast is another day’s walk, and though Elrond isn’t certain where he’s going once he gets there, he’s still anxious to see the shore. To quell the anxiety, he lights his pipe—Celebrimbor actually _whittled_ one for him, as a gift with a special delivery of the Dwarven leaf – and begins the journey. 

The bare trees surrounded by new snowfall are still and silent as graves, yet life punctuates the quiet. Elrond finds himself staring at strange new birds that come to perch indifferently on the empty boughs above him. He swears he knew every species in Beleriand as a boy, but these with their unknown markings and foreign songs are creatures of the new world. There is so much more to learn, he thinks; so much knowledge in the keen little eyes of the fox who startles him when he comes around a boulder. 

The longer he walks, the more he can see. The high settles in and the woods begin to set a stage. 

He doesn’t know if it is a property of the drug or simply its ability to still his mind, whether ancestral memory or overindulged imagination, but visions of the kind he first had in ‘Brimbor’s smithy continue to come to Elrond under its influence. Some scenes he knows from legend: there, in the high branches, Lúthien in her bower, spinning her hair into rope. Others are more mundane: a tall bright-haired Elf with three children running around her all in a blur, perhaps Idril, his Noldo grandmother. Twins recur, at various ages: twins climbing trees and digging up stones, twins punching each other and pulling at braids, and though at first Elrond is certain he’s seeing himself as a child, the closer he gets the more foreign the faces become. There are hunters drawing longbows; there are people dancing, feast days that he perceives from a distance like an uninvited guest. 

It could be the past; it could be the future; it could be only figments. He harbors a childish hope for where it might lead him, only half-acknowledged once he’s sobered up by his evening fire, inventorying supplies and cursing the chill wind. 

The thought that somehow his mind’s eye will help him find Maglor—that their paths might cross in a thousand miles of uncharted coast—nonetheless wakes him up every morning. 

Elrond’s faint but constant awareness of his foster-parent’s sad condition these past years has undergone a sudden escalation. The trigger may have been Erestor’s latest break—now resolved enough that Elrond wears a pair of his kidskin and cashmere gloves, dropped off the day before he left (“Vintage from Tirion, so no eating venison jerky in them, please.”) If an Elf so vital can still be felled by the shadow of the past, what of one whose life was eclipsed long ago? 

But the guilt has been metastasizing for a year or more, the nagging regret that he didn’t investigate when there were still reports of Maglor’s presence on the periphery of the disassembling war camps. 

In truth he had been afraid of who he’d find. The tale of the final attempt on the remaining Silmarils had confirmed to the letter all the worst Fëanorian stereotypes. Though Elrond knew better, he’d still felt jarred. All he’d heard of the fate of Maedhros he believed; for many years the fire had been calling him home. But the Maglor of his upbringing—absent-minded, soft-spoken—he could not imagine as a thief with burning hands. 

Then again, it had been years, by the end of the war, since Elrond had spoken to him. By the time he and Elros reached their hasty majority, all pretense of foster-family had dissolved. No sentimental tokens were exchanged, no promises to write. The more Elrond busied himself in the camps, the further Maglor faded into the general calamity. He and Maedhros had their own work, their tentative alliance with the Men and Elves of Beleriand fighting to unbind the holy light from the Iron Crown. Their two-person conspiracy against the entire sane world. 

The last time he saw him, Maglor had been on horseback, and Elrond hurrying on foot from one late-night meeting to another, the two of them the only souls on the muddy avenue. 

Elrond had frozen in his steps, startled, was forming the words to greet the Elf he still thought of as his father. 

And Maglor had looked through him with total unrecognition, riding away into the dark. 

Only the Oath was real to him by then. 

Yet the Oath is no more—isn’t it? Obsolete, bound to a world that no longer exists. If Elrond can find him, he’ll bring Maglor back to Forlond, and give him a quiet room, and a harp, and let him keep writing the song he was always working on. Wouldn’t Gil-galad jump at the chance to commission the second half of the _Noldolantë_? It’s a matter of cultural import, Elrond determines, practicing his rationalizations as he picks his way through a field of icy, mossed-over stones; the forest is thinning, the cold air now bearing the tang of salt. A matter of our history, he thinks. No matter the sorrow, or the depravity, we can’t turn our backs on it. 

_Or we could. We have._ There is a reason Maglor has self-exiled, that no one else finds reason to look for him. If Erestor or the King has guessed at the motivation for Elrond’s coastal sojourn, they haven’t said, but he can too easily imagine what their reaction might be should he manage to haul the battered Fëanorian to the city gates. All the trust placed in him—the conviction, in spite of his youth, in his sobriety, his good judgment—would crumble in an instant. He would be revealed as he is: a child, softhearted, desperate, delusional. 

_So I’ll build him a home here_ , he thinks, taking another pull from his little pipe. (He has been smoking steadily as he walks, but the visions won’t come today, and the woods are lonely.) How hard can it be, building a home? He’s already done it for two thousand people, after all, memorizing Erestor’s plans, calculating to the brick the supplies for the construction sites. Four walls and a roof, a little cottage. A hearth. 

How very cold Maglor must be, in his endless wandering. 

The birch-bark around him is taking on a golden sheen, like the reflection of a distant fire. Before long he spots it through the breaks in the forest: the golden trail of Arien, flame-bright across the purple-green, impossibly wide Sea, and the Sun herself above, still full but sinking slowly into bands of lavender clouds. 

Elrond steps into her light. He’s come to the edge of the land, a high, rocky bluff presiding above oddly calm waters, the waves murmuring in the freezing air. He swears he feels warmth curling through his fingers and toes, across his exposed face. Warmth, or maybe numbness. 

Definitely numbness. 

With the light dying gorgeously in the backdrop, Elrond makes a camp when he finds level ground. He knows that if the wind picks up, he’ll be exposed. But the view is too good; he can risk it. He is pleasantly high, still. He wants to eat dinner and look at the ocean. His little fire rises as twilight spreads across the horizon. 

Elrond is cracking a precious quail egg onto his lightweight camp-skillet when he notices there are ships on the water. Funny, he thinks, this isn’t near the trade-route. 

Then he realizes: Ships in his head. _Oh._

Tentative steps bring him to the cliff’s-edge. 

He can see a whole harbor now, gleaming with its own light. Delicate lanterns bobbing on a maze of docks. Tethered to them: white ships. Impossible ships, blooming like lilies out of the water. 

Their narrow bows are tapered, shaped into swan-necks. 

Elrond eats slowly, focusing as close as he can on the food. But his gaze keeps darting to the water; each time the harbor is still there, humming with its harbor-life. Smaller boats come in with fishing nets; deckhands in shirtsleeves tie up sails. Songs, even, rise up from the docks, chanties—he can only understand about a quarter of the words in the old Telerin dialect, but _sea_ comes through well enough, and _drunk._

Perhaps he is seeing another night at Alqualondë, a night when nothing happened. Elrond waits until the fire has died to put out his bedroll. 

He’s certain he won’t fall asleep, but his freezing body drinks in the warmth. Everything fades away; he is breathing evenly, snuggled in the solid earth of the living world. 

Then he is shaken awake by the shouting. 

When Elrond bolts up, his camp is engulfed by a scrum of armored Elves. Faces are half-shadowed, illuminated by torchlight and its fiery glint off bared swords. Bursts of archaic, conversational Quenya lisp violently through the air; too fast for Elrond to fully understand, but he grasps the key verbs. 

_Need_ , he hears. And _take. Take. Take._

“ _No_ ,” Elrond assures himself, the only word he can summon, shaking his head, crawling out of bed, going hands-and-knees back over to the tree-line, where he hides himself behind the nearest trunk. “No, no, no, no. Not real. See?” 

He shuts his eyes, hard, covering his ears like a child. But the clamor continues, and when he looks up again into the dark forest, with the light flickering and the angry voices rising behind him, he knows, in horror: this _is_ real. 

His mind’s strange reserves, his blood-memory, whatever it is, has been listening. It is giving him exactly what he asked for. 

Elrond peers around his tree-trunk. There, in the middle of the fray, still where the others are restless, is Maglor. His sword still undrawn, his helm in his hand, and he is young, frighteningly young: face unlined, hair all-black where it was always threaded with gray at the temples. 

The rest of the scene fades into a blur of rabble and wrath, but Maglor is as clear to Elrond as his own trembling, shivering hands. He watches as he raises his face to the darkening sky, lips summoning some inaudible prayer. 

Or song. 

With all around him falling to ruin, the great singer stands completely still. Elrond is watching him compose the first stuttered stanzas of the inevitable lament. The song that never really ended, that even now threads itself around the trees and branches of the lonely coastline, entwining it with the shores of another world, another Age. 

But the trance breaks. 

Elrond sees the horrible shift in Maglor’s eyes: anger and pain and brokenness welling as he, too, unsheathes his weapon. 

The phantom army rushes into the darkness. 

For a long moment there is a silence deeper than the sea, deeper than death. Elrond pleads with his own mind— _no more, no more_ —as it stretches and creaks, and lets in the sound of fire, crackling and rippling on the air. 

Fire and laughter. 

He is swallowed whole, into a rush of _everything_ —shadow and flame, blazing eyes and treacherous swords, swords gravely mistaken and swords all too sure of their intent. Cries of anger, of pain, of pleading. Wet sounds of death. 

Blood on sand, blood on earth, blood on stone. 

It is Alqualondë, Losgar, Doriath, Sirion, and it is happening all at once. 

Elrond is running into the woods with his brother while their house burns, but Elros is faster than him, and he is alone. He has always been alone; he has never left these woods, and his brother is far away and there is a monster following his steps, a tall dark shadow moving too quickly, coming closer, its pale arm outstretched, reaching for him… 

…holding him, stilling him, taking his hand. 

The world shifts around him. Elrond is swept into a new memory—but now it his own memory. 

He is very small, and he is walking on the seashore under the night sky; someone holds his hand. He is also very upset, because for the first time he has realized something important: that he and his brother have different names. 

Elros seems to already know this, since his name is almost identical in meaning to their mother’s, and Elrond is jealous, and possibly crying. But it is Elwing who stands with him, holds him to herself, while his brother splashes in the spray. 

_See how the stars in the sky become the stars in the water?_

He looks up, but Elrond can’t remember what his mother’s face looks like. Even the dream-logic, the drug-logic, won’t summon her. He can feel the pulse in her hand, but she is only a shadow. 

_He is the sea_ , she whispers. _And you are the air_. 

Gently, the shadow cups his face. Tilts his head skyward. 

Elrond opens his eyes on blue dawn breaking through the shadowed treetops. Between their dark limbs, he spots a too-bright star rising on the western horizon. 

Aching, tense, freezing, he stumbles back to his camp on the cliff’s edge. His twisted bedroll is right where he abandoned it, but for a long moment, Elrond stands contemplating the cold and distant light. 

How many times has he silently cursed the evening star while all around him revered its glory? 

Yet Eärendil is also the morning star. Every night he makes the same journey, and every night he will until the world’s unmaking. Dawn, dusk, across the dome of sky. The star had guided Elros to Númenor. What guidance has it ever held for Elrond? 

_How to stay in perpetual motion_ , he thinks. 

How to exist, forever. 

The thought overwhelms him in a way it never has before.

They say Eärendil hadn’t wanted it, that he had only consented to immortality as a clause of the great destiny that was his privilege and his burden. More commonly, it is joked that he’d only gone along with it because that was what Elwing wanted, and to Elwing he couldn’t deny anything.

(The fact that much of what Elrond knows of his parents’ later life comes from bawdy drinking songs is something he prefers not to dwell on, but they have at times proved surprisingly informative.) 

If Eärendil had been given the choice, he would have passed out of this world into the doom known only to Eru Ilúvatar. And yet there he hangs in the sky, and Elwing with him in her bird-form, where Elrond will behold them night after night for a thousand years, and a thousand after that. Thousands more to come, should grave injury not intervene. 

While across the sea, the life of Elros Tar-Minyatur burns hot and fast. The life he chose; the life he rejoices in. 

Elrond often frames the choices he and his brother made in terms of temperament, affinity. That Elros sought out the Edain, a new life and new purpose, while he stayed in the misery of the familiar and clung to the memory of Maglor. More times than he can number, Elrond has told himself that he _had_ no choice, other than to mirror Elros. Equal and opposite. 

He neglects to remember that he had been afraid to die, and his brother had not. 

But it is the idea of immortality that overwhelms him now, immortality burdened with a thousand lifetimes of memory: all the ghosts that have surrounded him this cursed night. That he brought upon himself. 

His life has already felt long, and full of pain. Why had he asked for more? 

Why is he an Elf? 

“Because that is what you chose to be,” comes a voice behind him. 

Elrond turns to see the fire going again, and a shadowed figure tending to it. Long, dark hair framing a narrow jaw, and a gentleness in the hands as they stir the flame; _could it…?_

“Maglor?” he whispers. 

“No, not quite.” The fire-tender laughs. “I haven’t found him yet, either.” 

His visitor looks up, another foreign-yet-familiar face summoned by the unceasing high. 

Very familiar; very foreign. 

Elrond narrows his eyes. “Who are you?” 

“Only another traveler.” 

“How can you hear me? How can I talk to you?” 

“Perhaps we understand each other.” 

Elrond catches sight of the brooch binding together the traveler’s enviably untattered, unstained cloak: a boat and a bird. 

“Why have you come to my campsite, mysterious traveler?” 

The Elf before him smiles. 

“To tell you to go to sleep, Elrond.” 

Elrond feels the heaviness in his limbs, and the lucidity of the strange scene fading before his weary eyes. He falls to his bedroll and pulls up the covers, gathering as much warmth as he can to himself. The fire helps. 

“Good lad,” the traveler says. “Get some rest, now.” 

###

Before he leaves the next day—after waking up far too late—he makes sure to throw the dwarf-leaf pouch—with its entire contents—off the side of the cliff. 

Seagulls caw from the shore below, as if in approval of something, but Elrond declines to acknowledge the symbolism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re: "he is the sea, you are the air" etc - per my limited (tolkien gateway) research Elwing and Elros both more or less mean "star spray," whereas we all know Elrond means (the way less cool, imo) "star dome."


	8. Tenwi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playing fast and loose with the very sparse information available on Avarin names, at least in my perfunctory research! Also once again playing fast and loose with the LaCE, also consulted only perfunctorily.

**Tenwi**

The journey back to the city is sober, uneventful, and cold. Arriving home earlier than he’d announced, Elrond attempts to go undetected. He hopes to spend the day mostly in the bath. 

Yet almost as soon as he has walked into his apartment, he sees the note slipped under the door. The elegant, curling script is unmistakable. 

_Seeing as you’ve missed me terribly, and you have some free time today: Will be at below address. Want you to introduce you to a relation of mine. Wear something comfy! Love, A._

In spite of his exhaustion, upon reading this Elrond somehow finds reserves of energy to become deeply flustered, bathe hastily and forgo eating anything for a solid hour of braiding and beard maintenance. Looking in the mirror, he tries to convince himself that the aborted camping trip has left him with the vital glow to offset the bloodshot eyes and wind-chapped skin. 

He does, and then undoes, a meticulous, lopsided braid-crown, impulsively determining the more casual look will suffice, and rushes out into the street with multiple sartorial regrets trailing behind. 

So much so that when Alendel opens the door at the appointed address, the first thing they say is: “I meant something you _feel_ comfortable in, Elrond.” 

Elrond looks down on the pale-green-and-puce formal pajama set he’s wearing under his cloak. A gift from the King, and yes, he’s never broken them out before, but it seemed like a good enough idea ten minutes ago. Alendel’s aversion may originate with the fact that they received a matching set, in some equally horrendous color scheme. 

“I’m comfortable!” 

“I don’t know why he keeps thinking he’s going to get wide-leg trousers to catch on. Come in, come in, you poor thing.” 

Alendel kisses him on the cheek, a gesture Elrond reciprocates very casually and certainly without going red in the face. 

“Welcome home,” he stammers. 

“Home!” Alendel ushers him into an elegant parlor decorated with boughs of ivy and pine and sundry other seasonal foliage. “What a strange concept. This city doesn’t feel like home to me. Does it to you? Sit, sit.” 

Elrond, eager to follow instructions and find warmth, takes a seat on a daybed by the hearth. He realizes this is one of several large, well-appointed guesthouses Gil-galad had requested be built for diplomatic purposes, should any of his skeptics pay a visit to Forlond. There hasn’t so far been much use for them. 

“How is your family?” he asks. 

“Well enough.” Alendel kneels down to attend to the tea-tray before the fire. “Seems they already had their whole complex of villages built up by the time we were laying in the pipes. They think I’m ridiculous for not living in a tree.” 

“Do you live…here, now?” Elrond asks, accepting a mug of hot something-or-other. 

“Oh, absolutely not. I’ll be back to my apartments in a few days. I brought back a very special guest with me from the Greenwood, and the King’s been kind enough to let her sojourn here." There is a slight strain, in Alendel's mention of the King's kindness, but then their voice regains its honeyed tone. "Do try the tisane, it’s her signature blend. Be back in a mo.” 

Alendel jumps up, turning toward the inner hallway. As they cross the room’s threshold, though, they turn and smile. 

“My dear Elrond.” Alendel shakes their head, their dark grey robes draping elegantly from their narrow shoulders, their silvery hair catching the firelight. “I _am_ happy to see you.” 

Even though he is haggard in hideous pajamas, Elrond fills in, but he summons a response: “I am most glad to see you as well, Chief of Staff.” 

Alendel trails away, and Elrond feels like he is thawing—not only physically, after the long week of exposing himself to the elements. In the months they have been away, he has kept his sentimentality about Alendel’s absence under lock. The pair of them had worked side by side, seen one another nearly every day for over a year—and then his friend was gone, and Elrond had been fine enough without them. Hadn’t he? 

This is a significant area of expertise for him, after all: getting on fine enough without people. 

But now, surrounded by warmth, all that held-back feeling is flooding up his spine; the _yearning_ , always there, never acknowledged, reveling in its fulfilment. Which is only to _be_ with Alendel. Work with them. Talk with them. Look at them. Occasionally, fleetingly, touch them. 

Anything beyond that gets a little hazy. 

Or perhaps that’s just steam from the tisane in his cup, which seems to be scented with completely unfamiliar herbs; Elrond takes a sip and is perplexed by a taste that is bitter, sour and spicy all at once. 

Hearing voices carry down the hallway, he recovers a neutral facial expression. 

Elrond has heard Alendel speak in one of the Avarin dialects on a few occasions, but there are many, and this one he doesn’t recognize. Now they reappear, accompanied by the special guest, presumably: an Elf with completely white hair, wearing a strange assortment of green and blue shawls, who upon seeing Elrond exclaims loudly and switches to unaccented Sindarin. 

“ _Look_ at you! Endi, you didn’t tell me he was the spitting image of his great-grandmother.” 

The strange Elf rushes forward, taking a seat beside Elrond on the daybed. She grasps his hands with her calloused fingers. 

Elrond looks to Alendel for instruction. “Erm, which great-grandmother?” he asks. 

“Why, Lúthien, of course! Where do you think you got that _adorable_ underbite?” 

Alendel comes forward, seeming inordinately pleased with the whole situation, and themself. 

“Lady Tenwi was a handmaiden to Queen Melian,” they explain. 

“Melian?” Elrond repeats, while Lady Tenwi lifts up his left wrist, as if examining a horse. 

“The very same,” she says. “And _you_ have her cuticles. _I_ should know! Ha!” 

Tenwi—the name is un-Sindarinized. (As must be what she just called Alendel: their true name?) She shifts her hands to his face, pale green eyes scrutinizing each unfortunate feature. She is—well, she must be—but more strangely she _looks_ old. Not in a way any Elf ever does on purpose. Not that Elrond is aware of.

“Hmm. Now, where do I start? The beard?” 

“Pardon?” Elrond manages through squeezed cheeks. 

“Aunt, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” Alendel takes a seat by the fire. “Elrond, Lady Tenwi is a healer, of a kind.” 

“A healer? Endi, sister-child, you’re scaring the boy.” Tenwi finally lets go of Elrond’s face, holding up a reprimanding finger. “I’m no healer. _I’m_ a witch. And with the Queen’s blood in you, little princeling—safe to say you are, too.” 

“…Oh,” says Elrond, unable to grasp any other suitable response. But Alendel interjects, placing their elegant hand on his hideously-pajama’d knee. 

“My aunt came to Doriath from our people’s lands in the east ere the laying of the Girdle. She sought your foremother Melian’s knowledge of the changing of forms. The reshaping of the…” They pause, searching for the word. “… _rhaw_? To match the _fae_. As the Sindar say. We have our own words for this.” 

“The _hröa_ and _fëa_ ,” Elrond murmurs. 

Tenwi frowns in distaste. “How ugly that sounds. The Noldor may have the _terminology_ , but they have absolutely no understanding of the art.” 

“And so Queen Melian was kind enough to take you for a pupil, was she not, Aunt?” Alendel continues. “She taught you the art of reconciling the body and spirit.” 

“Yes,” Tenwi smiles wistfully. “As she herself had once done, shaping the earthly home of her ethereal soul to suit the life she wanted. Many of us she taught who felt likewise, and though we were not Maiar as she, and could not weave a new body out of light and air, there were still ways her wisdom helped us change.” 

“Changing forms,” he says. “Do you mean…Lúthien taking the shape of the dread bat-creature? Or my mother…” 

The fact that he might be able to grow wings, in a pinch, has never crossed Elrond’s mind before. 

Tenwi waves off the suggestion. “Like I said, with the Maia blood _you_ lot can get showy about it. Us Elves of simpler stock, though, are capable of making simpler changes. I owe my life to such a simple change, one that your great-great grandmother helped me to make. Did you try the tisane?” she asks, reaching to serve herself. 

“It’s quite remarkable,” Elrond says, which is not a lie. 

“Good lad. Where was I? Ah.” Tenwi wafts the steam toward herself, breathing deeply. “Now, when Queen Melian met me, she didn’t see what everyone else did: a mousy little Elf-boy blending into the brush. She knew as well as I did: that I was an Elf-maid. I daresay she had an inkling I might someday hatch into a full-fledged Elf- _crone_.” 

Delighted, Tenwi spreads her shawled arms. “And of course, she was _right_!” 

“So you’re…you were…” Elrond starts, and is immediately, gratefully intercepted by Alendel. 

“My aunt has _always_ been herself,” they say. 

Elrond nods, tabling a large slate of unanswered questions. 

“Yes, yes, my dear.” Tenwi takes up her tea again. “I am of the Athnothrim, as they called us once in the tongue of Doriath."

People who cross; people on both sides. Elrond has not heard the term before.

"As for the matter of always being myself," Tenwi continues, "we all take time to fully _show_ ourselves, don’t we? Even to our own minds. There’s so much that would speak against that small, certain voice.” 

The Lady pauses again, eyeing Elrond over the brim of her cup. 

He is remembering the night, months ago, in the muddy camp outside the unfinished city, when Alendel asked him if he had thought about changing his body. There is no doubt now that this was what—was who—they were alluding to. 

But what does Tenwi think he wants to change into? 

“Certainty,” Elrond finds himself saying, “is never a talent I have possessed.” 

“Well, then, let me hazard a guess.” Tenwi chuckles, and then assumes a completely straight face: “You wish you felt more like an Elf. And looked like one, too.” 

Elrond laughs: a release of nervous energy. 

“Ah. I did think…you were possibly suggesting…that I…” 

“Become an Elf-maid yourself?” Tenwi bursts out laughing. 

“Oh, no, Elrond. Not at all.” Alendel says, blowing on their teacup. “Not unless you wanted to.” 

“If I did…if I _do_ … _ought_ I to want…?” 

Given this is the first time he has ever been made aware of the possibility, Elrond is not equipped with an adequate response. 

Fortunately, Tenwi interjects, holding up a finger. “Endi, we are going about this entirely the wrong way. Let me explain.” She clasps her hands. “In the _fae_ of every Elf—yes, including the _fëa_ ,”—a theatrically exaggerated pronunciation—“of those who think crossing the Sea puts them above such things, there is a certain proportion of, as your lot say, _nís_ to _nér_. Regardless of how the body is shaped, each and every one of our souls has its own proprietary measure of feminine and masculine energies.”

“Or put another way, no measure of either,” Alendel offers, sipping. 

“I apologize, my dear, but I unfortunately _must_ rely on the binary for my illustrative analogy.” 

Alendel rolls their eyes; unimpeded, Tenwi continues. 

“Now, if you want to believe the Vanyar propaganda”—the old Elf offers her own eye-roll—“the presence of certain commonplace external genitalia indicates a soul that is either entirely _nís_ , or entirely _nér_. And never the twain shall meet save for in the sacred bond of marriage. Yet to assume such bonds go onto to produce children that are entirely one way or the other willfully misunderstands the nature of the blending of the souls, does it not?” 

She pauses, looking to Elrond, whose new and encyclopedic carnal knowledge by nature excludes the mechanics of procreation. But he nods along, even as his mind scrambles. 

“I do not doubt there are Elves out there for whom the _fae_ is wholly on one side of the binary, and perfectly in accord with the _rhaw_ received at birth.” Tenwi laughs. “May they live in bliss! Most of us are not so simple. We remain blended. Some of us may shift back and forth, throughout our lives, perhaps without ever knowing what is happening. We Athnothrim have sought methods of realizing in body the nature of the spirit we know internally.” 

Tenwi smiles again. The content she seems to feel with her own presence—the same content Alendel has always shown, in their own, quieter way—does impart a kind of secondhand joy. Or peace. 

Neither seems to possess the anxiety Elrond has felt his whole life about playing a part that doesn’t quite fit. 

“And so, Elrond, my hypothesis, when Endi told me about you, was that being of a blended spirit in terms of _species_ —Man and Elf, and a dash of Melian—you might similarly be made to embody physically that which you feel in the nature of your spirit.” Tenwi raises a fist in emphasis, then lowers it. “Endi is right. While some of us may find comfort in our binaries—I certainly do—we are all part of a continuum of divine being. The entity you call Eru adheres to no form, be it male or female, Elf or Dwarf or Man. But I think this is little understood among the Eldar. Perhaps that is because of your gods, in their matching sets, or the hierarchies they impose upon you. And yet the very existence of the Peredhel defies the binary nature upon which that order of the world claims to rely!” 

Tenwi assumes a pitying expression. “But raised as you were among the Noldor, and their rather rigid conception of identity—blood feuds, inherited curses and all—I doubt this remarkable gift was ever adequately celebrated.”

“I do not count myself among the Noldor,” Elrond says. 

The statement surprises him, rising unbidden—unforeseen—from his own breath. But he realizes, for the first time, that this is indeed the truth. 

“Among whom would you count yourself?” Alendel asks softly. 

Elrond contemplates this for a long minute. 

“The Elves.”

He imagines he sounds rather idiotic, drawing this simplest of possible conclusions. Tenwi smiles, and Alendel nods, while he stumbles to elaborate. 

“Or, well, the Peredhel. But within that, I…made a choice. Without enough thought, it sometimes seems, but the choice was…nonetheless made. And I must live with it. _As_ it. As myself.” Elrond can feel his cheeks burning. 

Tenwi, unfazed by his embarrassment, instead expresses great sympathy on her kind face. 

“If your mind is at war with itself over the matter of your identity, so shall your body be.” 

“No,” Elrond begins, then hesitates, laughing—“well, I mean yes, and that’s a rather apt way of putting it. War. But I mean to say that I am not conflicted, not any longer. I do wish to be an Elf. I already am living as one, more or less.” 

He swallows. “And at the risk of being shallow, you are saying you might help me with this? Becoming more…Elf-like? In soul and in body?”

“This is _exactly_ what I am saying!” Tenwi exclaims. “And what I am offering you. Shallow!” She rises, pacing excitedly before the fire. “Do not speak to me of shallow. My life would be a misery if not for my trust in shallow yearnings.” 

Tenwi walks toward Elrond, searching his face. Her very pale eyes seem to look beyond him, as if she can perceive visually the strange admixture of his soul. 

“We must prepare you, however.” She backs away again. “With your Maiar ancestry, powerful forces may be unearthed as we work the craft.” 

“…We?” Elrond looks to Alendel, who shrugs with only the faintest trace of self-satisfaction. 

“Yes, yes, I consider it to be a collaborative process,” Tenwi insists. “And moreover, I would dishonor my Queen Melian to not impart one of her line with the wisdom of her arts!” 

Half-hesitatingly, Elrond asks: “What will the process entail?”

“Well, that is what we must determine together!” Tenwi says. “The work of the Athnothrim is a matter of song and herbs, like most things. Tinctures and poultices to sooth and prime the body, to bring forth some physical traits that may be desirable. Song that draws out one's true nature, and makes it seen. But know it is no process of enchantment. If it were mere spells that made me who I am, they would have worn off centuries ago. It is more subtle work to bend the _fae_ and _rhaw_ to one another. It can be tedious. And it does not always perfectly realize the expectations we hold beforehand.” 

Elrond half-remembers the exhausted vision of the fellow-traveler who had come to him during the most disastrous night of his vacation. He is, and isn’t, sure that it was himself, and is less able to make the determination the further removed he is from the experience. 

“I do not know what to expect,” he confesses. 

“That is well,” says Alendel. They reach for his hand. 

Elrond takes it, expecting his heartbeat to start hammering with the contact. But he feels perfectly calm, perfectly natural. 

“Do we begin today?” he asks. 

“Oh, I think not.” Tenwi retakes her seat. “I expected we might, but I imagine this has given you much to contemplate. And I think this will not be like anything I have attempted before. I require more time to plan as well.”

“Sorry,” Alendel says, sotto voce, squeezing Elrond’s hand. “That means your pajamas were all for naught.” 

Elrond cuts his eyes at them in mock-scorn, a bit more flirtatiously than he’s ever managed before. 

“There is one thing you can do to start,” Tenwi nods, paying no heed to the revolutionary display of romance before her. “Endi, would you fetch that balm? The one in the blue glass.” 

Alendel gets up, thumb caressing Elrond’s knuckles before they break away. 

_Home!_ they’d said when he arrived. _What a strange concept. This city doesn’t feel like home to me. Does it to you?_

_Yes_ , Elrond should have told them. 

“But you will return at your earliest convenience,” Tenwi says to Elrond as Alendel walks off. “We have much work to do together.” 

He bows his head. “I will have a look at my schedule. I do imagine the King will have need of both the Chief of Staff and myself in the days ahead, since we have been gone.” 

“Very well.” Tenwi knits her fingers. “I think your King, however, will agree that your personal development is a matter of great import to the kingdom’s good governance.” 

Elrond considers revealing that the King, in fact, has suggested he take as much personal time as he desires, but thinks better of it. With whatever changes are ahead for him, he imagines that work will remain an anchor. And a comfort. 

“Here we are.” Alendel sweeps in again, bowing to Elrond chivalrously as they present what must be the aforementioned balm, contained in a small deep-blue jar. 

“Wonderful.” Tenwi says. “First things first, you’re going to lose the beard.” 

It does always seem to come back to the beard. 

“From now on, you’ll shave clean every morning—with this stuff.” 

Elrond stares at the vial in his palm. “Will it…make it go away?” 

Tenwi throws up her hands. “I have absolutely no idea! It _might_ make your skin feel very nice.” 

“I must thank you, my Lady—” Elrond starts, but Tenwi waves him off. 

“Don’t thank me yet. Now, Endi and I have a game of backgammon to finish, and you, my young friend”—she rises, smoothing her shawls—“ _you_ look like you need a very long nap.”

###

In the morning Elrond stands before the mirror.

(He did take Tenwi’s advice, sleeping for a good thirteen hours.) 

Now he’s sharpened the blades, washed his face thoroughly, scrutinized every scab and pock and disproportionate pore. The jar of balm is open on the table beside the basin, its waft subtly vegetal and smoky. The strange scent of something new. 

He is thinking of Elros in the camp of the Valar, turned to him in brotherly sarcasm. 

_You’ll shave your beard, I suppose? Be a shame, really. It’s looking quite nice._

Of Alendel, cupping his face. _Such a simple thing, really, a beard._

Simple and not. 

Elrond takes a breath and picks up the blade.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Athnothrim is the term I'm using in this story and sequels to mean, essentially, transgender - it's Sindarian ath (across, both sides) + nothrim (people).


	9. Alendel, Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for transphobia.

**Alendel, Again**

The months that follow are both return to normal and a complete break from life as Elrond has come to know it. 

The normalcy he finds returning to work, with Alendel there each day, and a significant new project on the horizon: that is, the building of Harlond, the new port across the mouth of the Gulf. Erestor is back to his drawing-board, and the King to his micro-management, albeit with a somewhat lighter hand this time around. Apart from the more comfortable surroundings, and the better snacks, it is as if they’re back at it in the drafty tents, trying to imagine what a city might look like. 

And yet the arrival of Lady Tenwi has introduced some strange discord into the order of the world. The strangeness derives in significant part from the ways she has proposed Elrond change his being, and the methods that will be required to do so. Yet beyond the confines of his mind and body, he begins to see that her presence is a source of subtle upheaval in much larger ways—though the full shape of this disturbance, and all those it entangles, takes time to reveal itself. 

Another upheaval: Elrond no longer has a beard. This should be irrelevant, but it keeps on finding a way. 

Gil-galad, to his credit, says nothing at first, though his eyes go wide as saucers when Elrond walks into the council chambers that first morning, and he seems rather excitable throughout their discussion the newly proposed boundaries of the Númenórean sturgeon fisheries. 

Everyone else has paid Elrond their compliments and moved on by lunchtime, but at day’s end the King summons him into his administrative office on some flimsy pretense. 

“ _Excuse_ me, but I don’t think we have been acquainted. May I ask your name, O mysterious and exceeding handsome stranger?” 

“My liege, as you are aware, I have quite a lot of work to catch up on—”

In a perfect performance of astonishment, Gil-galad brings his hand to his breast, star-tipped manicure on full display. 

“Why, could it possibly be _Fingon_ the _Valiant_ , returned from _Mandos_?!” 

“What could move you to say something so profoundly awkward?” 

“Take a compliment, Elrond! Besides, you might turn out to be more related to him than I am. We still don’t know for certain.” 

Gil-galad twirls around the room, coming to prop his feet on the same battered desk that stood between them in the first moments of their acquaintance. (It has since been refinished.) He beams, radiantly, as Elrond attempts not to scowl in the doorway. 

“May I have your leave now?” 

“No, I don’t think so. Let me admire a little longer.” 

Elrond rolls his eyes, yet he stays. “Don’t look too closely.” He felt his skin roughening by midday; at this point he is losing the war with both stubble and the various nicks and cuts of an inexpert hand, soon to erupt into pustules. 

“Tell me, what got you to do it?” The King continues to marvel, seemingly in both real and mock awe. “Or _who_? I can tell Alendel approves.” 

“If you’ll excuse me, I have about three weeks’ worth of permits to sort through regarding _your_ new harborside corniche…” 

“Have they been playing a long game with you? Feigning to like the beard all this time, then getting you to think it was your idea to go clean-shaven all of a sudden? They’re very good at that kind of thing.” 

“My face, my decision!” 

Elrond finds he is raising his voice. Also lying, a little bit. Eliding. 

He regains his composure. 

“If you absolutely must know, I was influenced by the encouragement of Alendel’s visiting relative. The Lady Tenwi.” 

Gil-galad’s eyebrows rise into his relatively understated rose-gold circlet. 

“Lady Tenwi?” he repeats, some strange note dampening his jocular tone. 

“Yes. She’s staying in one of your guesthouses?” 

Shouldn’t the King know? Elrond is both confused and annoyed, and at this point certain that both moods are coming across quite plainly. 

“Yes, of course.” Gil-galad’s blithe smile thinly veils vexation, at what Elrond cannot guess. “Alendel made all the arrangements. I’m afraid I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet the good Lady socially.” 

Alendel made the arrangements for what? Is Tenwi’s visit more than happenstance—more than for Elrond’s own benefit? 

He’s missed something, in his self-absorption, and he doesn’t feel he can go back and ask. 

“That ought to be corrected.” Elrond takes the edge off his voice, just slightly. “You’d get along.” 

The King smiles into the middle distance, fiddling with a dry inkwell. “I don’t doubt that at all. You know…Laswiniel,” he starts, then searches at length for the second half of his sentence. 

Elrond waits for him to assemble the words, which resolve finally into: “Laswiniel is a friend of Lady Tenwi’s.” 

Gil-galad nods as if he has drawn some potent conclusion—not just made a totally innocuous statement. 

“How fortunate for them both to be reunited in the same city. I didn’t know Laswiniel was from Doriath.” 

“Oh, she’s not.” _Thunk._ The inkwell continues to be agitated against the desk. “The Falas. We were childhood friends. I forget if I ever mentioned that. Ha.” 

_Thunk._ Gil-galad is laughing nervously, something Elrond cannot recall ever experiencing before. It is, in fact, quite disturbing. 

“But I meant they are new friends. Since Lady Tenwi’s arrival. Friendship! A wonderful thing. I do encourage it.” The King sighs, absently. “Well. Thank you, Chief Councilor.” 

“My liege…?” Elrond bows uncertainly, turning to leave. 

“And congratulations!” 

Elrond feels an awkward slap on the back, and finds Gil-galad following him out. 

“I owe my thanks to Lady Tenwi,” the King says. 

“Assuredly,” says Elrond. “Goodnight, my liege.” 

Gil-galad smiles, but there is still something strange in his eyes as he turns to ascend the grand staircase to his apartments. 

At the far side of the empty council chamber, Elrond finds Alendel still at work by the light of a sputtering candelabra. 

“I think you’ve made someone very happy,” they say without breaking concentration on their indexing. 

Elrond takes the seat across the table. “Alendel, was it the King who invited your aunt to the city?”

They blot their quill. “He was unnerved to hear you’d met her?” 

“You were listening, weren’t you?” 

“Just because the door is left open doesn’t mean one must pay attention.” Alendel sighs. “It’s no surprise. He doesn’t want anyone to know she’s here.” 

Elrond is taken aback. “Was that his order to you?” 

“No.” They continue writing. “It was his _implication_. Which I have chosen to ignore, because to make such an implication would be the mark of an utterly craven monarch cowering in the shadow of his throne.” Alendel’s calligraphy grows marginally more aggressive with each passing word. “And _I_ have his reputation to uphold, do I not?” 

They finish with a flourish, exhaling as they lay the pen onto the inkstone. 

“You’ve got a little…” Elrond points to a dab of black on their cheek. 

Alendel rubs it into a grayed-out smudge with a shirtsleeve. 

“Better?” 

“Endi…” 

“Not quite there, darling. With the top of the tongue. Like _Nnd. Nnnnd._ ”

“Alendel…” 

“We’ll practice.” 

“…could you please explain what’s going on?” 

Alendel closes their eyes. “I would, Elrond, if it were my story to tell.” 

“If there is some matter that has emotionally compromised both you and the King…” 

“Do you know how I came to be in the service of the High King of the Noldor?” Alendel tips back in their seat, arms crossed. 

Elrond shakes his head. Why doesn’t he? 

“I don’t think I’ve ever thought to ask,” he says. 

“It’s not an especially interesting tale. It must begin like a thousand others from the last years of the war.” 

Alendel exhales; though their delivery is nonchalant, tension draws the line of their jaw. 

“I was with a band of my people retreating northward on the River Celon. The great battles were like a storm in the distance. But we only trying to survive. We fought off passing orc gangs; others we traded with. Our loyalty was to the earth alone, and we were watching it die. Mountains would disappear from the horizon, day after day; the air was always thick with their dust, do you remember? And the plants were choking, all of them gray and withered.” 

Elrond remembers the color of the air, all those years: a palette of red to grey to black. But he had been sitting behind a desk, factoring volcanic sediment into crop futures.

“Then came the floods,” Alendel says. “I don’t know where it started, the Aros…” 

“The Sirion and the Gelion both,” Elrond murmurs, remembering the sickening day the messengers had ridden in bearing panicked news of the rivers breaking their banks, one by one, and the rush that had followed for higher ground. But he had been in the foothills of the old Ered Luin; it had not been hard to find. 

“We were between the Celon and the Little Gelion. It came from everywhere.” Alendel tilts forward again, bringing their elbows to the table, their hands hanging from their neck. Eyes half-closed. “I watched many of my kin walk toward the rising waters. They chose to be drowned by our gods, rather than live in a world yours were breaking apart.” 

Having been on the receiving end of enough empty condolences in his life, Elrond knows when to keep his mouth shut. He only bows his head and continues to listen. 

Alendel looks up now, grimly. “Yet I did live, and some others. We crossed the East Vale, when the waters receded; we came to one of the camps of the Noldor near Mount Dolmed, only a palmful of refugees among hundreds. There was no shelter, barely any food. Just the masses of us fighting to survive outside the borders of the white tents.”

Elrond can picture it all too easily. 

“I bought what peace I could for my people, stealing into the warehouses at night and brokering with our fellow unfortunates. Of course, the camp guard caught wind of the operation. I was captured and imprisoned. And so I would have stayed. But as I was being transported one morning, from one dismal holding pit to another, my escort and the High King’s happened to pass one another on a conveniently crowded avenue.” 

“Convenient for what?” 

“For me to spit on his glittering boots.” 

Elrond clamps a hand over his echoing laugh—a _giggle_ , practically. 

“And?” he says once he has recovered. 

“And what?” 

“How did you contrive to get from there to…here?” 

“Oh, well, the King graciously stayed his retinue from cutting my tongue out.” They crack a bleak smile. “Then he asked around about the spiteful dark-Elf, ordered me released from my oubliette and brought me in for an audience. After some choice words on my part, he hired me on the spot as a special assistant to oversee displaced persons initiatives. And demoted the guards who’d caught me. Stable duty.” 

“He bought your loyalty,” Elrond says. 

“What he bought _off_ was his own guilt. At seeing a fellow Elf in chains. And starving.”

Alendel’s anger is cool and cutting, like broken ice; Elrond very much wants to reach for them, comfort them, but still feels frozen out. 

“That was all long in the past by the time you came to us. It took me many years to think of Gil-galad as anything other than some foolish lordling of whom I was simply taking advantage. To secure the safety of my remaining people and people like us. People whose gods don’t save them after they’ve trampled the earth to death.” 

Finally, they look up, eyes flashing green-black in the candlelight. “But in time I did come to think of him as more than that. As someone I could trust.” 

“You’ve made him a better King,” Elrond says. “I know he believes that.” 

This earnest retort picks some particularly bitter bone. 

“Maybe so. Yet there are times he still seems to think of me as a member of a backward tribe, elevated to the civilized world through his beneficence.” 

The weight of this profession—Alendel’s pain, roiling below the anger—sinks over Elrond. They have been so steady, these past years, not only a constant through his inner turmoil but a way-finder out of it. They have lived nine centuries before him, taught him more things than he can begin to remember. 

Their sureness, their calm, which has steered the kingdom, steered the King, steered Elrond—has it been coming all this time to an inevitable breaking point? 

Could he have been so blind? 

Elrond reaches across the table. Alendel accepts his hands into theirs, and together they are still for a moment. 

“I will have word with him,” Elrond says at last, not quite surprised by the new sternness in his voice. 

“Elrond…” 

“About whatever happened—or _has_ been happening—does he bring insult upon your aunt?” 

Alendel strokes a circle on the insides of his palms, but then they let go. 

“Tenwi is very content with her accommodations. It’s complicated, Elrond.” 

He recalls his strange conversation with the King. “He mentioned something about Laswiniel.” 

Alendel sighs tiredly. “I really can’t say anything about that. It is a private matter.” They pick up a pile of papers, squaring them against the table. “Besides, I think you’ll put some of the same pieces together yourself soon enough.”

With this, Alendel seems to regain the still surface of their usual decorum, which only serves to sadden Elrond further. 

“You’ll be seeing my aunt again soon?” they ask. 

“In two days’ time.” 

“Good. She was ever so pleased to meet you, you know. Keeps going on about Lúthien’s hair texture.” 

“She flatters me far too much.” 

At last Alendel smiles again. “I don’t think so. You’re very beautiful. I am glad you’ve chosen to show the world. Though I always knew.” 

“Have dinner with me,” Elrond says. 

Alendel picks up their quill. “Does either of us have time for that?” 

“No.” 

“Then later. When we do.” 

Elrond gets up and crosses the table, bending to kiss Alendel’s cheek. They accept—gratefully, it seems, some tension released in their neck. Then they take his face into their hands. Their mouths are barely parted.

“Smooth,” Alendel says, running their fingers down his cheeks. 

“Not really,” says Elrond. 

“Hmm.” 

Alendel lets go; Elrond, having barely escaped a willing collapse into their lap, straightens his tunic, and turns to leave. 

“Good evening, Chief of Staff.” 

Alendel turns back to their work, wearily. “Good evening, Chief Councilor.”

###


	10. Tenwi, Again

**Tenwi, Again**

Elrond has scarcely made sense of his conversations with Gil-galad and Alendel by the time he finds himself back at Lady Tenwi’s. If her presence has troubled the waters between the Chief of Staff and the King, the atmosphere at her guesthouse remain undisturbed. 

When he arrives, Elrond is led by an Avarin-speaking acolyte from the formal front parlor to some kind of inner sanctum. (In Erestor’s original floorplan, it might have been a breakfast nook.) The Lady is not yet present, though a carafe of her ubiquitous tisane is steaming on a tray, besides an empty clay bowl and a strange assortment of small objects: gray and brown feathers, a broken necklace of varicolored freshwater pearls. 

Elrond sits on a low tuffet, his knees hiked to his chest, and contemplates the arrangement. The room is lit by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the harbor, which this morning is a headache-inducing gray under a pallor of low clouds. Tenwi’s decoration, if it can be called that, seems fitting. He doesn’t know why, but it calms him. A welcome respite from the ill feeling in the council chamber, these past days. 

A delighted shriek issues from the hall. Elrond starts to rise, but is batted down by the arriving Tenwi. 

“Please, no need to get up. I was just admiring.” She is in all green today; her white hair is half-braided, in a kind of lattice splaying from the left temple, the right side unbound and wavy. She carries a candle on a silver dish, which she rests aside the bowl as she comes cross-legged to the bare floor. Immediately her hand comes to Elrond’s jaw. 

“Interesting.” 

“What?” 

“Your rash.” 

Elrond feels his own cheek, when Tenwi loosens her grip. He hadn’t _noticed_ a rash. 

“No matter. I’ll do some tinkering with my formula. Tea?” 

“Of course. Thank you.” 

Together they drink in silence. Elrond finds the taste more tolerable this time around; perhaps even enjoyable. Then he finds he has drained his cup. It has been a rather long silence, by now. 

He turns to Tenwi, whose gaze is fixed forward on the feathers and pearls. He follows her example. The silence lengthens. 

Before long Elrond is bored. And agitated. Maglor had been a proponent of meditative states like this. He’d tried to impart the same appreciation in his foster-children; it hadn’t worked. Too quickly Elrond is put in the mind of sitting in the musty room where they took their lessons, with his brother pinching him every thirty seconds. 

The memory is so vivid in his body that his hand flinches forward, brushing a feather. 

In the instant of this brief contact, the feather becomes an entire bird. It is perched delicately on his knuckle. Blinking at him. 

As soon as Elrond recoils in shock, it disappears again. But it was real. It was _there_. He still feels the imprint of tiny talons. 

Tenwi laughs in delight. “You remember!” she cries. 

“You could see?” Elrond asks, peering at the pile of lifeless feathers. 

“Oh, no. But _she_ could.” Tenwi takes up his hand, looking at him in a way again that seems to look beyond him, or far into him, into parts of his being Elrond has never yet delved. “My dear, dear friend.” 

“Melian?” 

Tenwi smiles. “She’s there. Threaded into you.” 

She pours out more tea, as Elrond stares at his hands. 

“The Maiar make themselves more comprehensible in bodily form, but in doing so they fail to convey what is most essential to their nature. They are continual, more than merely immortal; their spirits cannot be contained in a single body, but will flow into many vessels over the life of this world.” Pointedly, Tenwi hands him the hot teacup. “Though she passed into the West many years ago, part of Queen Melian remained in Beleriand, in the issue of Lúthien. Part of her remains still, in its remnant.” 

She sips, raising her brow. 

Confronted by these revelations, Elrond fixates on simpler matters—or perhaps not so simple. 

“So, the bird,” he starts. “It was hers?” 

Nightingale feathers. He should have known. 

“Yes! Starsong Willow-weaver.” 

“Was the bird’s name?” 

“She named all her birds.” 

“Why do you have the feathers?” 

“Maintaining the nightingale reliquaries was a very important part of a handmaiden’s duty,” Tenwi says, as if this should be perfectly obvious. 

“And the necklace?” 

“She gave it to me.” Tenwi lowers her head—there is an almost bashful note in her voice, strange to hear. “I admired it one day, and she told me…” 

“…that it would complement the leaf-bright eyes of a maiden of the Kindi,” Elrond says as his fingertips brush the pearls. 

The world has gone all-green: he is at the head of a great hall overgrown with lush vines, night-blooming flowers woven into an enormous arbor, and the impossibly young, silver-haired Tenwi kneels before him… 

He jolts his hand back; the scene dissolves again. 

“I have had visions like this before. Of the past, of memory, or history; I could not exactly say. But it has only been…under herbal influence. In previous cases.” 

Tenwi considers. “Such intoxication does only serve to draw out existing potentialities in the body and mind.” 

“But these other visions have not solely been of Melian’s life, or her world…even her lineage.” 

“Are they of yours?” 

Elrond nods, thinking of Maglor’s drawn sword, flashing in the torchlight; of holding Elwing’s hand on the shore.

“Well, you were granted her gift of far-seeing. This, perhaps among many others. A lucky guess that these objects might provide some conduit. I had only dared to hope that might it be! As you know, you know you are far from my typical case.” Tenwi’s voice lowers to a conspiratorial whisper. “We’re going to have to make things up a bit as we go along. Now, lie down for me.” 

She indicates a low mat laid out by the window. Elrond obeys, uncrossing himself, though he feels a little uncomfortable; without Alendel’s reminder, he hadn’t made time to slip into something cozier following the morning’s meetings, and is still wearing a bit too much brocade for total relaxation. 

“Take this.”

She lowers the bowl into his hands. 

“Was it…?” 

But Elrond feels nothing as he takes it, only rough clay. 

“Just an ordinary bowl.” Tenwi winks, kneeling next to him. “Helps with this sort of thing, though.” 

“What sort of thing?” Elrond asks, awkward hands cradling the bowl. 

“Oh, you know.” Tenwi takes up the pitcher of clear water next to the tea carafe. “Magic. Hold still.” 

Elrond manages not to wobble as she raises the stream above his navel. 

“But I thought you said this wasn’t about spell-craft. Or enchantment.” 

“Yes, yes. We’ll not be doing any spells. There’s enough power on the air from our encounter with the Queen.” 

The word _power_ makes Elrond feel queasy—that he hadn’t even known it was there, that Tenwi can somehow still sense it. 

“But we are pulling on threads.” Tenwi settles back; the bowl in Elrond’s hands is about halfway filled. “Gently, to start. It’s not enchantment; that involves directing power uphill, against the natural order. This is more about seeing what’s already there. Coaxing it into…what it might be coaxed.” 

Tenwi brings her hands above him, closing her eyes. Then opens one again. 

“This may feel strange, but perhaps no stranger than some things you have already experienced.” 

Elrond endeavors to keep the bowl balanced, as Tenwi under her breath begins a murmured song.

###

His sessions with Tenwi mostly follow after the manner of the first, although she presents him with no more artifacts of Melian. Once or twice a week, as his schedule allows, he arrives and is led to the mat by the window. He holds the bowl, and Tenwi pours out the water. Then she raises her hands and begins to softly sing.

At the beginning he always fidgets slightly, though so only ever so slightly that the bowl remains upright. The concentration required to keep it from spilling—and the fear of the embarrassment he might feel if it did—narrow his mind, until there is only the bowl and the water. 

Until Elrond is _inside_ the bowl, standing on the water’s surface. 

They are not unlike his earlier, drug-induced visions, but they are clearer. More contained, quite literally. While less ridden with the potential for traumatizing imagery, they are also significantly less entertaining, featuring, as they do, only one personage: himself, at one age or another, standing across the water. 

During the first several such attempts, Elrond is stuck with his very much _younger_ self. The child is a terrible conversationalist, prattling nonstop about seemingly everything he has observed in the natural world—frogs, beehives, rocks with fossils, whether the rain happens because of Elbereth or because of the Lord of Waters, how his brother found five hermit crabs yesterday. 

And yet this, Tenwi keeps emphasizing, is where the process must begin: in dialogue with the child, who is the manifestation of his _fae_. 

“Ask him who he wants to _become_ ,” she says. 

Elrond does, and reports back: “It’s a three-way tie between Uinen of the Seas, Beleg Cúthalion and Huan the Wolfhound.”

Tenwi cackles, offering no further guidance. 

Eventually he tries a different question. 

“Do you know who you are?” Elrond asks during one session, encountering a lull in a very long story about starfish. 

The child nods. “ElrondElwingionEärendilion with my brother Elros the heir of Turgon of Gondolin and Dior Eluchíl both.” 

The rushed delivery suggests rote memorization of the words and minimal understanding of their meaning. 

Elrond rephrases. “Perhaps what I meant to ask was: Are you an Elf?” 

For a fleeting moment, he watches the child consider this—and then completely lose interest in the question, breaking into a secretive, gap-toothed smile. 

“Did you know that…my brother saw a snake?!” 

When Elrond recounts this interaction to Tenwi, her reaction only serves to underscore an already frustratingly non-linear conception of progress. 

“Why, you’ve moved _beyond_ the question! That’s fantastic!” 

“Isn’t ‘am I an Elf?’ rather the point of this, my Lady?” 

“You’re doing marvelously,” she assures him, while somehow also rushing him out. “And your skin seems to be clearing up! I _thought_ it might be we were over-drying. Well, well! ‘Til the next.” 

Elrond bows, only to have the door slammed hastily in his face. 

While the larger project remains mostly confusing, he must admit that Tenwi’s skincare recommendations have been helpful. Although his facial hair doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and must be continually tamed, the right balance of moisturizer and astringent has made even its ghostly presence at the end of the day tolerable. 

It is in this moment of contemplative gratitude, as he draws his greatcoat about him and descends the guesthouse stairs, that Elrond nearly runs into someone who is coming the other way. 

“Lord Elrond!” 

“Excuse me—oh!” He bows, narrowly avoiding a second collision. “Lady Laswiniel!” 

Laswiniel smiles widely, lowering the hood of her cloak. 

She is a match for the King in every way, including their shared propensity for fashion; even in work-related meetings, Elrond has never seen her in an outfit without some quantity of beadwork. Yet today she wears simple gray robes, with her golden hair done in two long plaits. Incognito, he thinks. Or simply off-duty from performing the part of future queen. 

“I was just coming from Lady Tenwi’s,” he says, pointing helpfully. 

“And I was just arriving!” 

“Of course.” 

Elrond stands perhaps a beat too long on the step above her, recalling his perplexing conversations with both Gil-galad and Alendel. How they had both been mired some question circling Tenwi and Laswiniel. 

Yet Laswiniel, for her part, seems perfectly undisturbed to encounter Elrond on Tenwi’s threshold, and to have been encountered. She might like it if he got out of the way, though. 

“How lovely to see you,” she says in the most genuine manner possible, gently making her way towards the door. 

“The pleasure is all mine.” Elrond scuttles down the stairs, into a hurried bow. “Good day, my Lady.”

“Good day, Chief Councilor.”

###

There would be nothing at all memorable about this interaction, if not for the fact that it begins to repeat itself.

Elrond’s schedule with Tenwi is rather irregular, adhering as it must to both his duties to the kingdom and Tenwi’s strange notions of time management (seeming to involve, among other things, the cycles of the Moon). Yet after he Laswiniel run into one another on her doorstep a third, fifth, fourteenth time, each on some completely unexpected day of the week, Elrond begins to wonder if these are not social visits, but equally irregularly scheduled appointments. 

Laswiniel, conversely, must be crafting her own theories about Elrond’s visits to Tenwi. Yet even as their chance encounters become an expected ritual, neither of them ever ventures beyond an exchange of polite greetings; hello, and goodbye, over and over, before they lose one another once again to the murmur of the city. 

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kindi = one of the Avarin tribes* 
> 
> *per my extremely shallow Tolkien Gateway research (in spite of the fact that _The Peoples of Middle-earth_ is like 3 feet away from me right now).


	11. A Letter to Lady Galadriel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the beginning of Ch. 3 for why Galadriel and Celeborn are at Nenuial at this point of the timeline, it's CANON. or at least *a* possible canon.

**A Letter to Lady Galadriel**

_My dear Lady Galadriel:_

_I am remiss for not having replied to your letter of 14 Rhîw until this greatly delayed hour. I have the same poor excuse as ever, and I will not bore you with the intricacies of orchestrating a harbor-dredging nor the ongoing debate between Gondolindrim and Falathrim methods for concrete mixture._

_We all continue to anticipate the arrival of your child this summer—the King is most anxious to know whether you have received the crate of elderflower wine to mark the occasion later in the year, although I have of course assured him that your stewards confirmed its receipt and in so doing passed along your gracious thanks. That the House of Finarfin in Middle-earth will soon add another member is a source of great joy to him; I would expect another five to seven gifts before he is satisfied with his own generosity._

_You tell me that my letters read too often like laundry lists. The life of a functionary in a kingdom under ongoing construction lends itself to the form. I hope to try your patience a bit less today: there has been a new and strange development in my personal experience. Alendel, who as you know sojourned over the late summer and fall in the Iathrim settlement in the Greenwood, returned to the city recently accompanied by the Lady Tenwi; they are second or third cousins, though Alendel simply calls her Aunt._

_The Lady is practiced in a kind of soul-craft—I am not sure how else to describe it—which she has used herself in working to modify her bodily form. For she became female of her own accord—is Athnothrin, although I think the term in Sindarin somewhat lacks the full meaning of the word that she and Alendel use in their Avarin tongue. But she thought that some of the same principles might be applied to my own conundrum of liminality between the two kindreds. We have been working together in an attempt to bring me into greater alignment with an Elven nature. It is a strange process, spent half in a state between waking and dreaming, and I cannot foretell what its endpoint may be. Yet through it I have come to a greater understanding of my ancestor Melian, from whom Tenwi learned these arts as her handmaiden in Menegroth._

_When I mentioned our long correspondence, she told me she certainly recalls the Teleri princess who dwelt for a time in the Thousand Caves, remembering especially the vast lilac groves that the Queen had planted on the occasion of your betrothal. It does not seem you knew each other well, but I know Melian was a likewise a teacher to you. Were such methods of re-shaping the body widely known during you time in Menegroth? I am at times uncertain of all this, but my trust in Alendel, who devised the plan, is absolute, and my trust grows in Lady Tenwi. Moreover there is some family precedent for bodily transformation, as you know._

_I turn now to your latest move in our chess game, as set forth in your previous missive; while I fear there is absolutely no way forward for my knight, I submit here a pathetic attempt…_

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhîw = Sindarin winter
> 
> Athnothrin = adjectival (i think??) form of Athnothrim, my homebrew Sindarin word for transgender


	12. Laswiniel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for transphobia - individual, institutional, and perhaps internalized; as well as emotional abuse/controlling behavior. CW for drug use. 
> 
> Man, the back-half of this fic really is people having long, intense conversations! Sorry!! There is a fun start, at least. 
> 
> I know that it's definitely possible to interpret that the Laws & Customs were applied in a much more generous, less biologically deterministic way than I'm positing is the general practice here. But given the obvious heavily Catholic influence on Tolkien's whole conception of Elf marriage (and also the fact that that conception in zero way accounted for the existence of trans people, lol), I'm choosing to problematize the centrality of procreation for narrative reasons.

**Laswiniel**

The spring is approaching, and with it will come no détente in the tensions between Alendel and the King. 

The Chief of Staff continues to exceed their own exceptionally high standards; whatever unease they feel brings little disruption to their workflow. If anything, they seem more driven than ever to pursue excellence out spite—or perhaps out of loyalty to their colleagues. To Elrond.

(He has dared to wonder if it is their shared late nights, their quiet, working dinners—the comfortable intimacy, the ever-anticipated ritual of a chaste kiss before parting—that makes up the largest portion of Alendel’s reasoning.) 

It is Gil-galad who seems to be slipping. His normal performance of royal insouciance, masking the more controlling side of his nature from which he successfully governs, has taken on just an edge of desperation. Alendel’s coldness has left the King unmoored; Elrond, considering his own emotional dependencies, can extend sympathies to both sides. 

In the past, over far more minor issues, he has been caught in middle between the King and the Chief of Staff, both of them annoyingly taking him in confidence until Elrond either drafted a meeting agenda that succeeded in bringing matters to resolution, or Gil-galad got distracted by something and let Alendel have their way. 

Yet of this most recent conflict, neither of them will even say anything to him: Gil-galad seemingly out of a willful desire to deny anything is wrong, and Alendel, they continue to say, out of respect for Laswiniel’s privacy. 

Laswiniel. Encountering her, as he does, every few days in the vicinity of Lady Tenwi’s guesthouse, Elrond has begun to put some of the pieces together—but certainly not all, he thinks. 

He remains in this state of uncertainty until one of the last nights of the winter, when cold drafts rattle the windows of the city hall. Upstairs, in the ballroom, the King is hosting a supposed card tournament which has devolved into standard-issue rager, based on the raucous echoing. Downstairs, in the only conference room that currently has a functioning fireplace (due to ongoing flue issues), Alendel and Elrond are reviewing construction contracts, while at table beside them, Erestor crouches before a model of a new harborside warehouse with his pots of glue and orderly stacks of balsawood. On the floor before the fire, Hwenleth, the recently acquired special-assistant-mostly-for-getting-tea, sorts receipts by date and purchase category (and does her absolute best not to ask too many annoying questions about Khuzdul translation). 

This not-so-peaceable arrangement is interrupted by a loud knock on the door. 

“Hell-o!” calls a muffled voice, followed by snickering laughter. 

“Hwenleth, could you kindly throw the deadbolt?” says Alendel. 

Dutifully, the assistant rises, her hand halfway to the lock—when the voice continues. And the knocking. 

“By order of the High King of the Noldor, open this door at once!” 

Hwenleth looks petrified. Alendel looks like they might set the building on fire. Elrond looks to Erestor, who affixes a tiny buttress to a tiny column and wipes the dust off his hands. 

“Fine. I’ll get it.” 

Refastening the top two buttons of his robe, the Royal Architect steps over Hwenleth’s receipt piles and opens the door.

“Erestor!” Gil-galad strides forward, kissing him on both cheeks. 

Completely unfazed by this display of affection, Erestor bows. “My liege.” 

The King comes in, trailed by a posse of minor Noldo nobles whose names Elrond can never keep straight, either because the King refers to them by ridiculous Quenya diminutives or simply calls them “sundry Arafinwëans.” They are the sort of people Gil-galad is more inclined to associate with the drunker he gets. At the moment they appear to be his dearest comrades. 

“Look at all of you.” The King circles the room. He is wearing a very dark blue top-robe, velveteen, luxuriously beaded and dragging behind him with a scrape. His crown—silver today, with sapphires—is askew on his forehead. “All working in the middle of a party! We can’t have _that_.” 

“We are under a deadline.” Alendel stands. “By the order of the High King of the Noldor.” 

Elrond has not seen the Chief of Staff directly address the King in weeks. For a long moment the air between them crackles, like brewing thunderstorm. 

Until the King smacks the table. “Damn the deadline! We’ve all only got one life—or at least I hear getting to the second one is more trouble than it’s worth. What’s the deadline on…this?” He hops up to sit between Elrond and Alendel, indicating the various files. “I’ll move it.” 

Elrond, feeling the halo of Alendel’s acid glare, ventures into the fray. “May I remind my liege that we are already two weeks’ delayed on the dredging process.” 

“Yes, Elrond, we all get your _memos_.” 

Gil-galad pulls a face at the sundry revelers, who laugh loudly enough to betray the fact that none of them has ever seen a memo in person. 

“Have you even eaten anything all day?” The King springs back up, appealing now to Hwenleth, whose blushing reaction upon having him her personal space seems less flattered that panicked. “At least come have dinner. Then you can return to your precious _dredging_.”

Ten minutes later, Alendel is angrily gnawing on finger-sandwiches while Elrond and Erestor nurse glasses of watered wine. Dinner has not so much been much served as scavenged from various abandoned card tables. Snatches of off-key singing swirl around them. 

“I cannot believe he doused that fire,” Erestor muses, though the subject of how the King finally convinced them to come to the party has been circled many times. It has been an extremely dramatic quarter-hour. 

“We were outmanned,” Elrond says. 

Erestor shakes his head. “What _has_ gotten into him lately?” 

“The fact the he is being enabled by a decadent nobility, perhaps?” Alendel stabs a marinated mushroom. 

If Erestor is supposed to take offense at this, he doesn’t seem to. Elrond is not sure whether he, personally, counts as decadent, or a noble—but supposes, perhaps, that he does. 

“Cousin!” a voice booms across the hall: Celebrimbor, in an outfit garnished liberally with fox-fur, a bottle of something deceptively clear dangling from his oversized knuckles. By “cousin” he means Erestor, who tolerates an embrace, patting ‘Brimbor on the back and saying things like “yes, yes,” and “most assuredly,” while the burly smith launches into an incomprehensible drunk-Quenya monologue. 

(Their shared relation to Míriel—and only Míriel—has made Erestor the only kind of cousin ‘Brimbor will accept; ergo, his favorite cousin in the world.) 

‘Brimbor unfurrows himself from his kinsman, gazing with blissfully unfixed eyes upon his companions. 

“Chief of Staff,” he slurs. “Ron.” 

“What did you call me?” says Elrond, dropping the subject only because it has gotten Alendel—fleetingly—to laugh. 

“Pinky, get up. We’re going home.” ‘Brimbor’s wife approaches the group—with Laswiniel, who smiles at Elrond. Erenwen folds over her husband’s shoulders, entwining her fingers in his stubby braids. “Hello, everyone. And goodbye.” 

“And hello!” says Laswiniel. “You all just arrived. I hope it won’t be goodnight quite yet.”

“For my part, I am afraid it is.” Erestor rises. “If you want to know how I’ve managed to stay alive this long, there’s my secret: always leave parties early. Ladies.” 

He leaves, gently extracting himself from a second, parting embrace from ‘Brimbor. Erenwen wrestles her husband to his feet, and they follow. 

Alendel dabs their mouth with napkin. “I should be going as well. May as well rest a few hours, if we’re not going to have a suitable work environment.” 

“Chief of Staff, if I may—” Laswiniel takes tentative a step toward them. “Your aunt has been wonderful. Truly. Even with…” 

She falters. But Alendel comes forward, touching her on the arm; in their plain gray robes, they are a stark contrast to Laswiniel, in something pale and gossamer (the color hard to determine in the firelight), with a rich fur stole around her shoulders and sapphires on her brow (something to match the King). 

“I know she cares for you a great deal,” Alendel says. 

“And I for her.” Laswiniel bows her head. “Thank you.” 

The two Elves hold these same positions for a moment, Elrond only guessing at the meaning passing between them. But when Alendel breaks away, Laswiniel turns her attention on him. 

“Lord Elrond, I was actually hoping I might have a word with you.” 

“I, well…” Elrond looks to Alendel, as he always does towards the end of the night. But they simply draw him into a parting embrace. 

“Goodnight, darling.” 

Their kiss grazes his earlobe, sending a shiver down his neck that dissipates as Alendel slips from his arms. They turn to Laswiniel, embracing her in kind. 

Elrond then finds himself alone with the Lady. 

“Do you want to go outside?” Laswiniel asks. 

This is how Elrond ends up on the dark terrace, wrapped in a tapestry commemorating the Mereth Aderthad. It is cold, still, but the wind has died down. Various of his dead relatives dance about him in embroidery. 

Laswiniel carries a candle, which she places on the railing. From somewhere within her furs, she produces a well-rolled joint, offering to Elrond once she’s lit it from the flame. 

“Thank you, but no. I’m afraid the herb doesn’t quite agree with me.” 

Laswiniel nods through a practiced inhale and exhale.

“We’ve something in common,” she says. “Though I’m not sure what.” 

“Lady Tenwi.”

“Yes.” 

“Other than her, I’m not sure either,” Elrond admits. 

Laswiniel ashes onto the candle-dish. “We have lots of people concerned about our privacy.” 

They are silent together. 

“It is difficult,” Elrond begins, before he is really sure what he is trying to say, “being a person whose private life is a matter of public record. Or history.” 

“You sound like someone who has spent a lot of time listening to other people’s ideas about who he should be.” 

“Have you?” 

Laswiniel looks at him sidewise, leaning on the railing. “You’re not one of us, are you? I thought perhaps, at first.” 

Elrond considers his next question carefully. “Do you mean like you and Lady Tenwi?” 

Laswiniel smokes. “Yes, at least in the ways Tenwi and I are alike.” 

Elrond shakes his head. “I don’t think I am. Not in the manner of…” 

“Gender?” Laswiniel adds, with the faintest trace of pique. “Athnothrim. You can speak it aloud.” 

Elrond feels ashamed. This is the barrier that Alendel has been chafing against—the silence. The other side of the privacy they have vowed to protect is the reinforcement of some unspoken prohibition, which to Laswiniel must be far more binding. 

“I have not yet had the occasion to consider that matter. Still working on whether I’m really an Elf or not.” 

Laswiniel’s eyes widen, only slightly. “So that’s what it is.” 

“Tenwi hypothesized she might help me re-shape my _fae_ to my _rhaw_ , in a similar manner. Though I think we’re learning it’s more a problem of the former.” 

“I suppose that is the difference between you and me.” Laswiniel smiles faintly. “I’m quite certain about the spirit. And I was, about the body. It took a long time achieve that certainty. And a considerable amount of work.” She casts her eyes down on her own elegant form. “But it was achieved.” 

“You have…worked with other healers?” 

“Herbalists, yes. There was an understanding Sinda physician who thankfully survived to consult with me on Balar, when I was young. But it was a challenge during the war. I found Avarin healers, when I could, though none who specialized. The Noldo doctors in the camps either acted like they didn’t know what I was talking about, or genuinely did not know what I was talking about. Could not could conceive that such a person as me was possible.” 

“I must admit”—Elrond considers withholding the confession but finds the weak wine and lack of dinner gone to his head after all—"…coming up as I did among the Noldor, no one ever told me such a person _was_. Until I met Tenwi.”

 _And you_ , he does withhold successfully. 

“The closer to Valinor, the closer to the Laws and Customs.” Laswiniel exhales from a curled lip. Elrond thinks of the letter he just sent to Lady Galadriel. 

“Your people were Noldo?” he asks. 

“Mother was, and rather self-hating about it. My father was of the Falathrim. They were dead, before any this.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

Laswiniel laughs, gently. “You must have to say that to everyone you meet.” 

“Everyone I meet says it to me!” 

They grin at one another. 

“I am sorry we are not alike as you guessed,” Elrond says. “You have my confidence, though. I know these are not matters confessed lightly.” 

Laswiniel exhales a ghostly column, shaking her head. 

“You’ve misunderstood. I don’t at all care what anyone knows of me. Or thinks. I simply wish to live as I am. The love of a king, though…” She leans onto the railing again and brings her hand to her brow; the joint still is still propped on her forefinger. “The love of a king…complicates matters.” 

“So the silence is his will,” Elrond says. 

“It wasn’t until we began to speak of marriage. The King would keep me as a companion simply as I am. As a girl, the prospect of mere companionship was my most glimmering dream; the fact that he does wish to marry has proved…terribly moving to me, I’m afraid.” 

A sheen fills Laswiniel’s eyes; only for a moment, before her voice steels. 

“Yet to accommodate a marriage among the Eldar, one does need a womb.” She stamps out the joint. “The L’s and C’s are quite clear on the matter.” 

Elrond looks at Laswiniel, resplendent in the half-light of the candle—her face calm, but betraying sadness below the surface, and anger. Looking on her kindles the same blend of feeling in his own heart; he comes to the only conclusion he possibly can. 

“The King’s design was to bring Tenwi here to…alter you in this way? And to keep the matter veiled?” 

“So that I might emerge a true _elleth_ and suitable queen, in the eyes of the law and Gods.” 

Laswiniel turns, looking back at the party through the wide windowpanes in the doors. Inside, the revelry is ongoing. People dance in broken circles, laughter shrieks, music goes on and on. She seems too fair, too proud for the debauched atmosphere. She looks in every way a queen. Whether this is a kingdom worthy of her is the greater question. 

She sighs. “I told Ereinion that I did not believe such an alteration was possible, nor had ever heard of any like me making an attempt at it. That moreover only the most practiced specialists among the Avari would have the faintest hypotheses of how it might be approached. That most of them are dead, or far retreated from our borders.” 

“But he had Alendel to consult,” Elrond says. 

“Yes. Together we wrote an entreatment to them, while they were in the Greenwood. It offered a far vaguer outline of our conundrum. At my insistence, it did not hinge on marriage, or on the matter of…anatomy. They were most sympathetic. As was Tenwi.” 

“When Tenwi arrived,” Elrond asks, “what did she make of…” 

“Her assignment?” Laswiniel lets out a short, bitter laugh. “She is the best at what she does. But she knew as well as I did that such a thing was not to be achieved without divine intervention. Most of us don’t have a splash of Maia blood running in our veins.” 

“Not that helps especially much. Otherwise I wouldn’t still have to shave every morning,” Elrond interjects. “Besides, I know Tenwi doesn’t do enchantments.”

“And Tenwi doesn’t do enchantments. The King, unfortunately, seems to cling to the belief that all of this might be resolved with some kind of simple spell.” Laswiniel rolls her eyes. “If she would ever consent to it—which she wouldn’t—I’ve half a mind to ask her to perform such a glamour on me, bed him and leave him to deal with his eldritch ghost-child.” 

She laughs again, bleakly. Elrond can only nod, thinking of times when dark jokes about his own life experiences have landed poorly with too-sympathetic audiences. 

“What has been your work with Tenwi all this time, then?” he asks. 

“Much the same as yours, I would imagine. I have never done much beyond the herbal remedies, to shift the balance of my humors. And with that I was satisfied for many years; it changed the shape of my body to the extent I needed to...live as myself. But Tenwi…” Laswiniel pauses. “She has been a gift, though the circumstances that introduced us are fraught. She has given me songs to sing, that work under the skin like nothing has before. She has brought me in greater alignment with my true nature than I have ever felt." 

She draws her furs about her, her gaze distant. “And so on the one hand, it has been a wonderful time. On the other, my life is shrouded in secrecy, and I am no closer to rearranging my internal organs.” 

Elrond shakes his head. “And the King is aware this…will not come to pass?”

“He seems determined to retain Tenwi’s services until she contrives to _make_ it come to pass.”

“Which will be…” 

“Never, most likely.” 

“That seems a very poor arrangement.” 

“Oh, it is.” 

Elrond recalls advice from Tenwi, after a frustrating session with his child-self: _Ask him who he wants to become_. 

“Laswiniel,” he asks, “are you desirous of all this? To be queen, to…bear a child?” 

She turns away from the party, back to the railing and the darkness. “I am desirous of Ereinion, and our life together. Of his corresponding desire for that life. Of a child, perhaps. But there is more than one way to bring a child into one’s life.” 

“He ought to know that more than anybody,” Elrond says, remembering the King’s words when he first met him: _That poor woman who had to pretend to be my mother_. 

(Of course, he is also thinking of Maglor.) 

“And yet there is only _one_ way to have a legitimate Eldarin marriage, if you are the High King of the Noldor.” 

“I don’t understand,” Elrond says. “The King’s attitude on the Laws and Customs has seemed rather permissive.” 

“On the points which the Laws and Customs themselves are permissive. If one is avoiding procreation, one can enter into any arrangement one wishes.” 

“I am all too familiar with the variety of arrangements,” Elrond says. Laswiniel laughs as he continues: “Yet conversely, marriage _must_ be procreative.” 

“Yes. And people like me rather throw a wrench into things,” Laswiniel quietly concludes, as she turns back to face the party. 

She is trapped, Elrond thinks; and the King is fraying on the traditions he was born to uphold, and Alendel is enraged—and Elrond is caught in the middle. 

(While Tenwi, who has lived centuries and centuries before them all, only continues to do what she does best, and do it exceptionally, without regard to laws and customs that are completely foreign to her own.) 

“How long can this go on for?” Elrond asks. 

“I do not know.” Laswiniel sounds detached, now, and she smiles, waving at someone through the windowpane. 

One the sets of double doors bursts open. “You’ve _both_ been hiding from me!” Gil-galad shouts. 

“Only getting some air, dear-heart.” Laswiniel lets him into her arms. The drunken King seems exceptionally childlike, embracing his beloved with tightly closed eyes, murmuring endearments as his face ventures nearer and nearer to her chest. 

“I should take my leave,” Elrond says, as Gil-galad’s death-grip entraps his wrist. 

“Elrond.” He seems to be trying his hardest to keep his eyes focused. “I am sorry about the dredging.” 

“I will endeavor to compensate for lost time.” Elrond attempts to pull away, but the King has substantial musculature, somewhere underneath all the velveteen. 

“Can you… _ever_ …forgive me,” he murmurs—an attempt at dramatic delivery that only makes him seem halfway asleep. 

Elrond looks to Laswiniel, whose smile now betrays only a hint of melancholy.

He returns the same, and bows to her, electing not to respond to the king’s query as wrenches away his arm and goes.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Erenwen calling Celebrimbor "Pinky" = my fun take on a diminutive for Tyelpinquar. Probably others have come to this conclusion before me but it amused me greatly. (Although not as much as having Celebrimbor call Elrond "Ron," which made me laugh so hard [I made a shitpost about it](https://i-am-a-lonely-visitor.tumblr.com/post/635763643958657024/you-beren-is-jrrts-self-insert-me-an)).


	13. A Letter from Lady Galadriel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for transphobia. 
> 
> Perhaps a larger CW for...I am sorry for doing Galadriel like this! I love Galadriel! Under other circumstances I would write her in a very different way. I just also have elaborate headcanons that span into a sequel-fic about Celebrian, and this is the groundwork I felt needed to be laid.

**A Letter from Lady Galadriel**

_My dear Lord Elrond,_

_I write with the crocuses blooming around me, and the songbirds returning to the boughs over the lake. Celeborn continues to add to his avian index of the new world, complete with insights from your own observations of thrushes in the woods near Forlond. (If you might at some point reply to his note on the migration patterns of snow geese, enclosed in my missive of 36 Laer, he would be greatly appreciative; I know better than anyone how tedious his naturalist tendencies are, but you would do me the favor of keeping him occupied with a lengthy reply to compose in return)._

 _So spring turns again, and yes, with it the creature that stirs within me. She thanks you for the well-wishes, and anticipates the day when you will meet, as do I. (You may inform the High King that elderflower wine is not suitable for consumption by infants.)_

_I turn now to graver matters, for in truth your last letter troubled me. You asked me of my days in Menegroth, and with the Queen. Many arts had Melian, and still does wherever she walks in the uttermost West. I learned some of her, for I was held in favor through my kinship with her husband; yet not all. What you speak of I know was in practice among certain of her Avari servants. But as you of all people must understand, Elrond: though all perceived her as an Elf-queen, Melian was not Elf-kind. The scope of her being is beyond our full understanding, yet there were in turn things she could not understand—or willfully misunderstood—about Elves, and our nature: how we each are allotted the body and soul determined suitable by our Creator. In fact, I fear at times there were Elves who Melian toyed with, in the manner of Powers before her who have taken up a fondness for creatures of a lower order. The Moriquendi, removed as they are from the Light, were especially vulnerable. Though they may have perceived her teachings as a kindness, what is it that makes the “art” of corrupting Elven souls and bodies any different from the tortures executed by servants of Morgoth Bauglir on the unlucky forebears of the Orcs?_

_I have heard tell, over the years, of those Melian instructed in these dangerous practices disseminating them among confused Elves of all nations—to complement the supposed herbal remedies, ever brought forth behind closed doors, which are meant to induce changes in the wholesome and natural rhythm of the body. (There were members of my own family given to such tendencies; I will not say who, only that they all fell into sorrow in the end.) Dissatisfaction with one’s hröa is a universal phenomenon in adolescence; I myself remember my youthful fury that I would never be accorded the rank that was given my brothers and male cousins as a birthright. (My mother’s name for me is a testament to this.) Yet each one of them has perished, and still I stand. Had I committed myself to some elixir that lowered my voice (even further), that stoked my rage and my pride, I fear I would be haunting Mandos with the rest of them. Instead I have lived to be reconciled to my nature, as we all must, learning that I was made as I am as part of a greater design._

_I recognize that you, Elrond, have been brought forth from a more complex design that most of us; that questions of identity have ever troubled you. And I am sorry to speak of your foremother in this way, and still I hesitate to, but it is for the very reason that you are Melian’s descendent that I felt I must warn you of the danger you tread into by allowing such experiments to be carried out on yourself. You are far more powerful than this Tenwi, who, it seems to me, would exploit you for that power. I know that your Alendel holds a great influence over you, and the High King—but I submit that there is a reason the Moriquendi have in large part put themselves under the governance of my husband’s people. They are of their own accord too wild, and easily corrupted._

_I have witnessed half my life the consequences of tinkering too deeply with the design of our Creator. The beauty of the Third Theme is defined by sorrow; those who seek to unravel and remake its strands will come only to strife. Know this well: you will in your own time fulfill what is intended for you. Avari superstition need to figure into the equation_. 

_What Melian deigned to teach me, though I have far from perfected it, was foresight. I have sensed from our first meeting that your life and mine were entwined, in ways yet to be revealed. Though the High King had by then claimed you for his own, my aim from the beginning has been to foster in you the wisdom of my saner kin (and yours). The Ages to come in this remade world will require prudent guidance from the wise among the Eldar. I had such hope for this world when I came here, and that I have not yet abandoned. And so my hope for this missive remains that you will heed the counsel of an older cousin and take possession of the wisdom I see in you._

_I did, as you rightly expected, breach your defenses by disposing of your knight; I do believe that is check, but I will not presume your surrender. I hope I have not been too harsh, Elrond. In time I think you will come to understand; you are, after all, very young._

_Yours,_

_Artanis Nerwen Altáriel Arafinwiel_  
_Galadriel Finarfiniel_

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nerwen = 'man maiden', Galadriel's mother-name. 
> 
> I do not know ANYTHING about chess.


	14. Erestor, A Third Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for transphobia probably still stets.

**Erestor, A Third Time**

During his next session at Tenwi’s, Elrond finds himself in a staring contest. 

Across the water, a skinny, half-grown iteration of himself, with pious Maglorian braids and a scowl on his face, sits with spitefully correct posture in a frayed dining-room chair familiar from many awkward nights at the dinner table. His arms are crossed over the eight-pointed star emblazoned on his tunic. 

“You claim the Eldar are superior in all ways,” says grown-Elrond, though the designation seems relative. 

“That’s a tautology,” the brat responds in monotone. 

“Then what of the bigotry, the hypocrisy, the pride poisoned by resentment and infighting? The easy cruelty, the disregard for the life of their own kin, let alone for members of their race they deem inferior—and for other races they ensnare in their bloody intrigues?” 

“In beauty, in might, in arts and lore, in _strength_ —we surpass all the Children of Ilúvatar and lesser beings.” 

“And what of the shame brought upon any who will not confirm to the rigid ideals of _surpassing_?” 

The child’s mouth is drawn into a stiff line. 

There is something off-putting about him, something too perfect—betrayed by the clear, unblemished skin, the beady, bright eyes, the well-fitted clothes. (He and Elros, at this stage of life, were never dressed in anything but poorly tailored hand-me-downs; Maglor, for all his talents, did not inherit his grandmother’s virtuosity with a needle and thread.) It is Elrond, yet Elrond with everything but his Elven nature burned away: a little Fëanorian prince, haughty and stubborn and so maddeningly _certain_. He has never been this child; this child never existed outside of his own longing.

“Only those who are strong survive,” intones the child. “And I will be stronger than them all. My true father knew my strength; he found me and took me into his keeping.” 

“They destroyed your home, shattered your family—dispossessed you of everything you were born to. Had you been any older, they would have slaughtered you like the rest. It was only out of pity…” 

“I am not to be pitied,” the child sneers. “I am _glad_ this all came to pass. I am meant for a higher purpose than a fishing-village. I am a prince of the Eldar, mightiest and most wise!” 

Elrond awakes from the session shaking—“Mind the bowl!” Tenwi cries as she intercepts it from his hands. She offers him more tea, and though he knows he should settle himself, reclaim a calm head before he returns to the outside world, the sudden anger he feels does not seem like it will come to a resolution in this tranquil setting; nor does Tenwi deserve to receive it, though she had a hand in its unearthing. 

Instead, Elrond bids her a pleasant evening and makes for Erestor’s apartments. There is some errand he means to accomplish—returning a book, or borrowing one—yet this pretense dissolves as soon as the Royal Architect opens his door, in a white silk caftan and immaculate house-robes, and registers that his services are required as a sounding-board. 

“Shoes off, please. Do you want red or white?” 

“Nothing.” Elrond throws himself on the nearest divan, unlacing his boots furiously. 

“Hm. Something stronger?” 

At the sound of Elrond’s muffled groan into a throw-pillow, Erestor brings over a plate of biscuits, the jam sandwich kind.

“Perhaps this is more your speed, at the moment?” 

He settles into the opposite couch expectantly, cradling his own glass of white wine. 

“So?” 

Elrond stuffs a biscuit into his mouth.

Erestor sighs languidly, throwing his unbound hair off his shoulder (one elegant patch of silver descending from the hairline splays through the jet-black wave). 

“Morale does seem to be taking a hit, of late. If you think you’re the only one…” He drinks. 

Elrond takes another biscuit. “I think I’ve made the wrong choice.” 

“If I had a silver coin for every Elf I’ve heard say _that_ in the past six centuries, I wouldn’t be designing a food court right now.” 

“I mean fundamentally, Erestor.” Elrond swallows. “I mean _the_ choice of my life.” 

Erestor frowns. “Being a touch dramatic, aren’t we? I, for one, like having you around. I’d be sad if there was an expiration date.” 

Elrond laughs, miserably. 

“I do mean that. We all need you. You have a strange vantage, being who you are.” Erestor swirls his glass. “I think you bring people together, even if you don’t realize it.” 

“That’s only because everyone has their own idea of what I am.” 

“Perhaps it is because you make us realize we’re all capable of being more than one thing at once. Of containing multitudes.” 

“Very cute, Erestor.” 

Erestor sets down his wine. “What exactly has brought you to this latest crisis, if I may confirm my suspicions?” 

Elrond examines the biscuits. “I suppose I am furious with the King, and with the constraints on life and spirit imposed by Eldarin custom. And in large part with myself, for electing to become part of the system that will uphold said custom for untold generations.” 

Erestor knits his fingers on his knee. “He’s put himself in a very difficult position.”

“ _Himself?!_ ” Elrond balks. “He’s…” But he stops himself, remembering the matter of privacy. Fuming. 

“Well, yes.” Erestor picks up the thread. “It’s rather awkward for Laswiniel as well. But she, at least, could walk away. If she wishes to.” 

Elrond looks up. “You knew?” 

“I surmised,” says Erestor. “I knew a lot of girls like her in Gondolin, Elrond.” 

When he speaks of his life in the Hidden City there is always a note of ironic distance in his voice—keeping at bay the pain welling beneath. 

“So you understand,” Elrond ventures, “that the King wishes to wed Laswiniel legitimately.” 

Erestor nods solemnly. “If that is their goal, it will be long ere its fulfillment.” 

“He was convinced of Tenwi’s ability to achieve such a thing.” 

“Was Tenwi?” 

Elrond shakes his head. “Nor Laswiniel.” 

“Ah.” 

“So he would shroud her in secrecy, humiliate her, sanction her body to experimentation—though Tenwi, thankfully, will not—for the sake of marriage.” Elrond raises his hands. “I can’t fathom it, Erestor. If he loves her, he should simply be with her. Why cling to an institution that cannot comprehend the shape of your life?” 

Erestor examines his nails. “If one’s life has been lived in the shadow of rumor and speculation regarding one’s _own_ illegitimacy,” he postulates, “…perhaps, then, one might cling.” 

“But Gil-galad is always the first person to make light of that nonsense.” 

“Because if _he_ does it first, no one else can hurt him. Being born of clandestine circumstances can’t have been as easy on him as he makes it out to be. And so he wants his own marriage to be out in the open. An openness he plans to achieve, naturally, through impossible, clandestine mechanisms.” Erestor rises, his voice echoing as he trails over to the kitchen. “Repeating family trauma, Elrond; we all do it.”

He returns with an additional glass and the rest of the bottle. “Not to mention”—he serves Elrond—“that as a monarch who has already raised many eyebrows among the older generation, he is hoping his choice of spouse will not be another mark against him.” 

Elrond drinks now, gladly. “I was guileless in thinking it might not be. I mentioned Tenwi in my latest correspondence with Lady Galadriel and received…a reprimand.” 

“For mentioning her?”

“For _associating_ with her.” 

“Well, Tenwi is rather radical, isn’t she? 

Erestor sighs at Elrond’s exasperation. “You have to understand how little these things were spoken of. _Are_ spoken of. The Avari, Tawarwaith, they may have developed their own conventions during all those long years dwelt in darkness. Yet among the Eldar—certainly the Calaquendi—denying the form given you by Eru is…not something one goes about shouting from the rooftops.” 

“And how many have suffered because of this taboo?” Elrond asks tensely. 

“A few that I know of; though there must be untold others.” Erestor settles back into the couch cushions, speculating. “Galadriel herself, perhaps.” 

Elrond shakes his head. “Gil-galad has never adhered to convention. He’s the King; he can do anything he wants. He should stop subjecting Laswiniel to this insult and just _marry_ her, if she will have him.” 

“Yet he knows the Laws and Customs would not sanction it.” 

“She’s a woman!” 

“The Laws and Customs have a very particular definition of ‘woman.’”

“Erestor, perhaps you can explain to me—so few summers as I have known.” Elrond exhales. “Why is it that everyone is constantly having whatever sort of sex they want, but marriage can only exist within the confines of one specific configuration of genitalia? 

Erestor sighs. “The L’s & C’s contain only definitions. Not prohibitions. I am sure when they were passed down to the first chaste pairs of _neri_ and _nissi_ it was assumed no one would ever step out of line. Much to the benefit of their cousins discovering sodomy behind a nearby tree.” 

Elrond should laugh at this, but he is too impassioned; and so veers into an awkward change of subject. 

“You have spoken of Lord Glorfindel as your husband. Was it not marriage, between the two of you?” 

Erestor looks down into his glass. Elrond knows he has spoken out of turn; he opens his mouth to apologize. 

Yet his host holds up his hand. “I never called him that while he lived. It was _his_ term of endearment for me. A private joke. After he got himself killed, well.” Erestor pours himself another draught. “I allow myself a few sentimentalities.” 

“Did you not share a life? A home?” 

“Both.” 

“Were you not then _married_ , in every practical sense?” 

“Marriage is not about a household, Elrond. It is about children and families. For those of us who have our qualms about whether the world really needs more Noldo fief-lords, there are alternative arrangements.” Erestor sips, sinking into some kind of uncharacteristic reverie. “It does help if your arrangement is just shy of eight and a half-foot tall, muscle-bound, flaxen-haired and convinced he isn’t handsome because of all the times he’s broken his nose.” 

Beneath the veneer of self-mockery, Erestor’s sentimentalities are indeed showing. 

“I am sorry,” Elrond says. “I’ve brought my…disturbance into your home.” 

Erestor waves him off. “If I didn’t get to prattle on about him every now and then, he’d stop existing anywhere but in my memory. And Mandos.”

Elrond softens his tone. “After so many years together, should you and Glorfindel not have been afforded the same privileges of a so-called legitimate marriage? What of your property? Did you have any claim after his death?” 

“There was nothing left to claim, after his death.” Erestor drinks, giving Elrond a moment to acknowledge the stupidity of this question. “But had he died before the sack of the city, I believe Turgon held the dubious honor of being the only grandson of Finwë to never take even the faintest prurient interest in one of his male cousins. _Or_ brothers.” 

Elrond betrays no reaction to the whiff of gossip, at which Erestor rolls his eyes, subtly. 

“So there certainly weren’t any local domestic partnership ordinances in place, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

For a while after this they are silent. Elrond sits with his youth, his foolishness, his frustration—and shadowing it the folly of all the Eldar, the pride, the narrow-mindedness—while Erestor gets up and wanders over to his bookcases. 

“What was it you wanted to borrow?” He scans the shelves. “An annal, or something?” 

Elrond slumps into the cushions. “I can hardly remember.” 

Erestor walks back, shuffling a deck of cards. “At least have some manners and play a hand of rummy. You’ve exhausted me.” 

“It shouldn’t have to be like this.” Elrond shakes his head. “The King is going to unravel every good thing around him.” 

“Poor Elrond.” Erestor deals. “Always thinking so hard about everyone else’s sex life. What of your own? You know it’s getting quite tedious, watching you two brush hands across your piles of paperwork.”

###


	15. Man, Maia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for a small instance of sexual content (as opposed to meta/academic discussion of sex, for once).

**Man, Maia**

Across the water Elrond perceives a Man, of his brother’s stature, his brother’s proud look—his brother’s beardedness—all of it _more_ so, somehow. A Man without a trace of anything else in him, inscrutable and defiant. 

The Man regards Elrond in turn, his hand not quite removed from the hilt of the sword strung from his belt. 

“What do you want of me, Elf?” 

“Can you turn, a bit?” Elrond asks. “I would see you from the other angle.”

“I will not,” the Man grunts.

So the impasse continues. Elrond continues to observe what he can from this vantage, notes the familiar angle of the jaw, the slight, questionably adorable underbite. Sees that the Man’s cloak is bound with a brooch bearing the device of Bëor the Old. 

“Have not our people long been bound together by love and trust? Bëor was a great friend to King Felagund.” 

“He was a vassal,” says the Man. “Bewitched by your kind. The first of our people to be, and not the last.” 

“But of those alliances came some good, did it not?” 

“Some good,” the Man mutters. Yet he takes his hand from his sword. “Perhaps more sorrow.” 

The Man has grey eyes, of course; while they had seemed dulled before, in his repose Elrond perceives a kind of distant fire within. 

“Did you have a brother?” Elrond asks. He now perceives he is walking towards the Man, one slow step at a time, though the distance between them seems to lengthen the further he goes. 

The Man nods. “I did.” 

“And what became of him? Was he seduced by the Elves?” 

For a moment they are within arm’s length, but something warps Elrond’s field of vision. The Man’s face is obscured—and then he is far away again, and his voice is ghostly. 

“I know not his fate, for he is lost to me.” 

Elrond has not yet awoken weeping from one of Tenwi’s sessions, but there is a first time for everything. When he opens his bleary eyes, she stand above him with a handkerchief at the ready. 

“It’s all right, love.” Tenwi rubs circles on his shoulder-blades, as he attempts to compose himself as quickly as possible. Elrond has few memories of being comforted as a child not mired in the comforter’s anxiety, or pity—or shame. He rises, shaking off her ministrations.

“I really ought to be going—”

But Tenwi takes him by the hands. Her pale gaze is squared on Elrond directly, not probing some deeper layer of his being. 

“We can stop, if you need. I will only continue as long as this serves you.” 

Elrond thumbs away another embarrassing tear. “No. I think we’re making progress. Perhaps not in the direction we intended.” 

Tenwi steps away, beginning to rearrange the space. “The only intended direction is _you_ ,” she says. 

Elrond laughs. “Not an especially clear-cut path.” 

Tenwi’s attendant appears at the threshold, and they exchange a few words in the Avarin dialect. Elrond gathers his things, half-working out the translation himself before Tenwi supplies it. 

“My five o’clock is here, and you doubtless have about thirteen hours of work to do in three.” 

“Approximately,” Elrond sighs, as she leads him out. 

In the front room, Laswiniel is seated by the hearth with a book. Looking up from across the room, she snaps it closed—and waves, wryly, at Elrond, who bows in return. 

Tenwi snaps her fingers. “Oh, wasn’t I going to give you that blemish cream? ‘Winiel, love, I’m horribly sorry…I’ll only be a few moments.” 

“I am in no rush.” Laswiniel stands, straightening her shawls. “In the meantime, Lord Elrond can tell me about his blemishes.” 

Elrond raises his eyebrows in autonomic embarrassment. “Hello.” 

“Fancy seeing you here.” Laswiniel’s smirk is kind, but it falls quickly in concern. “All you all right, Elrond?” 

“Oh, Tenwi burned some incense…sensitive eyes. You know.” He smiles, attempting with mixed success to look pleasant and conversational. “And you are well?” 

“Well enough.” She casts her eyes down. “A bit grim, I suppose. I’ll be ending my work with Tenwi soon.” 

Elrond chooses his words carefully. “Was this her determination or yours?” 

“I’m leaving the city.” Laswiniel’s voice is soft but stern. “I haven’t made all the arrangements, but I have cousins who followed Círdan to his new havens; I’ve thought to stay with them for a time.” 

Elrond nods, betraying no hint of intrigue, nor anxiety about how this development may impact the King, and the kingdom; for this he is proud of himself, but on the other hand he is also very tired of it all. He imagines Laswiniel must be as well. 

“Lord Círdan has established a very tranquil refuge, by all accounts.” 

Laswiniel laughs. “If by tranquil you mean dull.” 

“Dull! I don’t think so. There will be boats to paint, and boats to wash—and boats to spot from the shore…” Elrond retreats from the jest. “If you need any assistance with your preparations, do summon the Chief Councilor’s office.” 

“I shall.” Laswiniel gives his arm a light squeeze. “The King…does not yet know, though perhaps he guesses.” 

“I will not speak of it,” Elrond says, meeting eyes with Tenwi as she rushes back into the room and thrusts yet another glass vial into his hands. 

“Two applications before bedtime—but be stingy,” she warns. “I know you’re sensitive.” 

“Thank you, Tenwi. My ladies.” 

Elrond leaves, as Laswiniel takes Tenwi under her arm, the two of them chatting and smiling as they trail into the further rooms of the guesthouse. A bittersweet sight, knowing Laswiniel’s decision. 

He walks out into a strangely warm spring evening, under lavender twilight, the paving-stones half-damp and the air still silky from an earlier rain. 

For a long time, Elrond resisted the affect-effects of Tenwi’s sessions, kept the emotional bleed-through at bay. That has been harder, recently. A good thing, Tenwi says, though Elrond has been uncertain of the benefit. 

Tonight, he is thankful he has nowhere to be with his sadness—except home. 

It is the continued welling of it that shocks him: while he eats, as he undoes his braids and gets into a hot bath. What does he have to cry about? 

Everything, apparently; but mostly, it would seem, about Elros. 

As a child, he had not known who he was without his brother, nor how to orient himself except in symmetry. They were for each other the only constant, the only comfort, after everything they had lived through, the high tragedy and grotesque comedy of it all. When had that shattered? 

Was it living in the shadow of brothers so unalike, and yet so bound together—brothers who had lived their long years in a twisted braid that led only to suffering and doom? 

Doubtless this assessment gives the Fëanorians too much credit, as Elrond knows he tends to. He lowers his shoulders into the water, the back of his head, and acclimates to the scald, his tears mingling with the wet. 

No—far before their Choice, their parting, it had been something much simpler: Elros had wanted freedom, and Elrond safety. And Elros _was_ his safety: the one thing holding back the fog of oblivion into which Elwing and Eärendil had disappeared—until Elros himself disappeared, first into war, then to Númenor. 

In his place oblivion has shadowed Elrond, the shape of absent family. 

He knows this—knows the bitterness, the desperation to fill the lack. His childish search for Maglor; the delicate balance with Alendel. Never going too far for fear that something will break. 

But knowing the loss, _fearing_ it—these states are distinct from the one in which Elrond presently finds himself: sinking deeper and deeper into loss, willingly. Without resistance. 

It is not that he is giving himself permission to mourn. He _is_ mourning. 

He is filled, suddenly, with a grave foresight that his life will be a continuum of it. 

Elrond plunges himself below the water’s surface. Suspended, he begins to perceive the strands the mourning is woven of: the lives before his that have been frayed by losses, by choices, the sum of which has led to him. 

Pulling on threads, Tenwi always says. And so Elrond pulls them all at once. 

He surfaces, gasping. 

Then the music starts. 

At first, he looks around his bathroom, wondering if it is coming in through the window; perhaps some band of revelers is passing by. But when he throws on his robe, dripping, and looks out into the street, he sees no one there. And besides, it quickly dawns on him, this music is not that kind of music. 

This music is indescribable. 

To call it merely beautiful would be an insult to is complexity, its embrace of an underlying tension, a creeping dread, a vast chasm of despair. Yet to call it terrifying would belie the pure bliss that it imparts. 

Six months ago, if such a hallucination had come unbidden (and not under the influence of any drug), Elrond would have resigned himself to madness. Today, the possibility that he has accessed the underlying music of creation, through yet another clause of ancestral memory, seems marginally less insane. Melian was there when it happened, after all. 

Yet the thought of any of his relatives is no comfort. As the cosmic orchestra swells—harps and lutes, pipes and trumpets, viols and organs, etc., etc.—uncontrollably, and with great horror, Elrond finds himself aroused. That this should happen in the presence of something so _holy_ would make him laugh, had he any mastery of his body, but instead he stumbles backwards onto the floor and into a very confusing climax. 

The tension in the music lessens, momentarily, as he stares bewildered at the ceiling. And then it softens, for a time after this, as he washes himself and dresses—but still it is there, ever-present on the edges of his mind. (Shades of Maglor.) 

Elrond tries to read; then he tries to clean; then he paces around his apartment, reciting prime numbers. 

When he is totally spent, he extinguishes all the lanterns and buries himself under his bedcoverings, but it is here, gradually, that the music grows louder than ever. 

Elrond feels like an echoing shell, like a hive of bees. There have been a few times in his life where he was certain he was about to die (during rare forays into battle; notably, the moment when a gore-flecked, fire-shadowed Fëanorian stood above him and Elros in their hiding-place in the woods, the moment just before Maglor laid down his sword). The threat has always been external. Yet now he understands: his own mind, with its terrible hybridity—its grief, its bemusement, its titillation—is more than capable of destroying him. 

But then he remembers why all this began. 

Vibrating with exhaustion, Elrond gets up and lights a candle. 

He crosses to his writing-desk, rattles the drawers for a quill and ink, fresh paper. As he sits the music comes to no satisfying resolution; only goes on and on, as it will until the world’s undoing. 

Yet something seems to calm (perhaps the cessation of timbrels) and steady (perhaps the elongation of the phrasing in the woodwinds) as he begins to write. 

By morning he has a very long letter to his brother, the more recent pages drying on the floor, waiting to be added to the thick volume already stacked on the table. Elrond peers at his own tight-fisted Tengwar, but Elros’s handwriting is worse; he of all people should be able to decipher. 

He throws a coat over his decidedly un-formal pajamas, knots back his hair, and compiles the pages without giving them another glance. At the last minute, Elrond scratches out a short memo to be delivered to Alendel, excusing himself from the morning’s work. Or day’s. 

He runs into the street, hastens for the courier’s on the corner to drop off these missives—writing a promissory note for the long-range postage—and then continues directly on to Tenwi’s guesthouse. 

All the while surrounded, inundated, with the ebb and flow of the great Theme’s tide. The music has not ceased. It is at times soft, or louder, but it is always there. It propels him forward; it seems to know what to do. 

At the guesthouse door, Elrond knocks, once (politely), and again (insistently). It is not the attendant who answers, but Tenwi herself, a half-chewed apple in both hand and mouth. 

“Elrond!” She seems delighted, though her voice is obscured by layers of melody. “And here I was, hoping for a breakfasting companion.” 

Elrond nods, sure that his expression is manic. 

“There is something very wrong with me,” he manages to say. 

And continues to attempt to explain, his delivery warped by the interference of cadenzas and chorales, as he follows Tenwi down the hall and into her sanctuary. Calm as ever, she sits him down, and pours him tea—and listens. 

“And I was in the bath, and the water, and perhaps, I think, created the conditions…” Mindlessly, the tears pool down his neck, dampen his collar. Elrond swallows; a crescendo builds behind his eyes. 

Tenwi puts her hand to his forehead, as if feeling for fever. Her face betrays no worry, but at least a tinge of puzzlement. Elrond waits for her to tell him the way forward, the way _out_ , but guiltily recalls Lady Galadriel’s poisoned warning: _You are far more powerful than this Tenwi_. 

At last she draws back. “I do not think it would be wise to put you under, and the moment. It will be safer if you are calm.” 

Elrond blinks, trying and failing to will back the spasms of melody. “I can calm myself.” 

Tenwi nods, directing his shaking shoulders toward the floor-mat. “Take your time, love.” 

Laid out, Elrond attempts to steady his breathing, timing each exhale to a downbeat, and finds the music somewhat cooperative. Or _interested_ , curious; he feels its tendrils flickering and peering over him like moths circling a lantern. 

Still his heart hammers, but the rhythm becomes predictable, locked-in. Elrond does not at all feel calm: he feels _directed_. Awesomely, terribly _puppeted_. 

Once he understands this is where the music wants him, he calls for Tenwi with the best semblance he can summon of tranquility. 

She seems skeptical, but still fetches the water. 

“Be mindful, Elrond.” 

“I shall.” He smiles up at her through a languorous, terrifying glissando. 

Tenwi has provided her own warnings about what power might be awakened within him. If she thinks of this now, she says nothing. Or perhaps Elrond’s performance has simply done its work. 

She passes him the bowl, and pours. 

It is not that the music stops once Elrond is suspended above the water’s surface. It resolves; it narrows; it is…a hum. 

Coming from the mouth of the being across from him. 

It is…himself, as much as the first child was, and the second, and the Man—a being smiling at him with perfect teeth; with long, thrice-irised eyes. (Gray; blue; green.) 

The being is exceptionally tall, and naked, but not in a way Elrond has ever been naked: glittering with…scales, or silvery patterns that seem to shift on the skin, or the sun-caught leaves of branches growing from the bones of the shoulders, arms, spine. Nor is any sex perceptible. Elrond strains to see, to comprehend, but the harder he looks the less anything makes sense. There might be wingbeats, of thousands of nightingales; there might be the laughter of infinite woodland streams; and all of it part of the music, tied into the Theme. 

But seeming to sense his disorientation, the being shape-shifts—reduces, clothes itself, and becomes Elrond as he is, with his messy hair and unslept-in pajamas, and a normal number of eyes. 

“Hello,” says other-Elrond, who in spite of his replication of original-Elrond’s slovenliness still seems to glow with perfection, still _shimmers_. “I’m sure you know it’s not polite to stare.” 

The music seems to have stopped, now, except for in the dulcet singsong of other-Elrond’s voice. 

“You are…” Elrond finds his throat is very dry; he has dehydrated himself from crying. 

“You, but more fey.” The creature screws up its eyes, contemplatively, in a way Elrond recognizes from his own facial musculature. “F-e-y, f-a-e; more the latter, perhaps. As you know, you’re not fated to die anytime soon.” 

“…my Maia aspect,” Elrond murmurs. “Melian?” 

“Some of her.” The creature smiles sweetly. “But we’ve been with you all this time—well, _all_ seems a relative term, what’s it been, sixty-odd years?” 

“Give or take,” says Elrond warily. 

“Yes, not really much time at all. But we’re not unadulterated, as we once were. The mingling, in your generation, has been quite…unprecedented. So in short, no, not Melian. Not Lúthien or Dior. Not your mother. Just…Elrond.” 

The creature shrugs, splays its hands. It gets up and begins to walk toward him. 

“Though I had another part to me, once. I wonder where it got to.”

“Very far away.” 

“It would seem. So you have only me to call upon, in your time of need. I am sorry if it was dramatic.” 

“I…don’t think I meant to,” Elrond says. “Summon you, I mean.” 

“Well, you _did_. And all by feeling sorry for yourself! Quite a show. But now I am obligated to help you.”

“Help?” 

He now perceives the creature standing tall above him. Touching his jaw, with fingers that look exactly like his own but feel like tendrils, like feathers. Elrond doesn’t know whether to flinch, or to be comforted, but it seems he has no choice of either: the creature mesmerizes, his own eyes glowing at him from within his own perfected face. 

“Yes,” he says to himself. “Help—and heal.” 

A blinding rush surges through Elrond—like a blow to the back, a lightning-strike. 

He falls forward to his hands and knees. The strange water does not splash, only trembles slightly as his reflection resolves below him. 

But the other-Elrond—the creature—is gone. For the first time he is on the water totally alone. 

He opens his eyes in Tenwi’s sanctuary. She stands above him, brow raised. 

Elrond blinks.

“The music stopped,” he says. 

He puts aside the bowl and sits up; he feels light. Good. He looks at his hands, appreciating the shapely cuticles inherited from Melian. Notes the lack of damage at the nailbeds, where he tends to pick mindlessly. Healed indeed. 

Tenwi takes the bowl. “And you are otherwise well? You do look much better.” She sounds suspicious. “Strangely better.” 

Elrond leaps up, pointlessly straightening his pajamas. “I think my disturbance has been altogether resolved. Thanks to you.” 

He kisses Tenwi on both cheeks, and she laughs. 

“I don’t think I deserve overmuch credit.” 

Tenwi never asks to know what it is he sees on the water, though Elrond often tells her anyway. It is his choice to divulge, she says. 

This is the moment she has seemed nearest to asking, standing hesitatingly at the doorway as Elrond stands to leave. 

“Let me look in your eyes,” she says instead. 

Elrond obliges, and Tenwi takes his face—tentatively, for once. Turns it side to side. 

She has been able to perceive things in him, in the past, parts of his nature obscured from Elrond himself. For the first time, he feels a reflexive barrier go up; a veil of obfuscation. It is coming from him, not quite consciously, but Elrond finds he likes it. 

“Hm.” Tenwi removes her hand; suspicion fades again to a smile. “You seem very well indeed, my love.” 

Elrond nods, finding, suddenly, that the space around has taken on new dimensionality: every ordinary object overlaid with its own pattern of…something that is both light and Music, color and shadow. Tenwi herself auraed in soft green that dances at the edge of her being, some strands of her licking toward him, most in cautious retreat. 

But he blinks again and finds things reordered, the world once again familiar. 

“I am most grateful, my Lady.” 

Tenwi bows, and together they walk out. “You’ll keep your next scheduled appointment, though. And report to me anything…strange.” 

Elrond puts on his coat. “I’ll come running just as I did this morning.” 

“Good boy.” Tenwi pats his back. “I suppose you won’t stay for breakfast, then?” 

“If I am disposed to, I should be getting back to the office,” Elrond apologizes. Feeling ordinary again, as if the past many hours took place in a fading dream. “And I think it’s rather lunchtime, by now. I am sorry for taking up your morning.” 

“Oh, I’m not.” Tenwi waves him off, opening the great door. “It’s always time for second breakfast, once you get to be my age.”

###


	16. Gil-galad, Again (Mostly)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for transphobia.

**Gil-galad, Again (Mostly)**

It is not that he does not notice the strange looks people give him—previously indifferent neighbors in the street, junior colleagues in the halls of court, his regular Falathrin fish-vendor at the harbor market, who stares as she wraps his trout fillets. 

Strangers have been staring at Elrond his entire life; children, since his majority, have pointed him out to their minders, gawking at the strange, young, bearded Elf. It has only been since he’s started to shave that he has experienced any reprieve from this phenomenon. That something in his person should once again seem to disturb the general public is unsurprising. 

Elrond also finds, this time, that he simply doesn’t care. 

He understands he must seem _alluring_ , or something—having never found himself to be an especially attractive person, the effect is hard for Elrond to perceive personally. There certainly are changes coming over him, though they are so gradual, so natural, that their progress is difficult to track. Elrond cannot pinpoint the exact moment he finds himself with smooth, bright skin, conspicuously and utterly—at last—lacking stubble; with hair that is darker and fuller and less prone to snarls. (He even stops tying it up as much, leaves it loose down his back with only a barrette holding it off the face, which feels indulgent, Valinorean.) 

It is not only the shallow qualities in which Elrond finds himself improved. His focus is better, without the usually hunger-related fug that tends to overcome him in four-hour intervals. Hunger is different now; when it comes upon him, he is eating far more in general, with little thought to the consequences for a functionary who has rarely leaves his workbench. And yet he also finds, through self-experimentation, he can now go days at a time _without_ eating—or sleeping. This is something he has seen Elves do with ease throughout his life, but which had always proved impossible within the constraints of his particular body. His former body? It seems to still be there, only with renewed vigor thrumming under the surface, filling out his muscle, his memory. 

He works more quickly, so much so that he starts to find hours of the day opening up—which Elrond decides first to devote to studying the Avarin dialects. A partial lexicon-book is extant in the royal library, half the pages missing and the rest charred at the edges—burned where, burned how, the possibilities are too numerous, but the author was a Noldo of Nargothrond, and at least the conjugation tables are up front. When Elrond runs out of vocabulary, somewhere around _unque_ , he starts quizzing Tenwi’s attendant—Veszti is her name, and once he has even a meager grasp of her language, she is all too delighted to converse at length. Elrond quickly realizes that the lexicon’s shortcomings extend beyond its physical damage, and starts outlining a better lexicon, one with comprehensive lists of word-variants in each of the dialects. He begins with Veszti’s native Windan, and as a placeholder and reference-point, the adulterated cant familiar to the Nargothrin lexicographer. 

Tenwi supplies a handful of Kindi words, but seems a bit dismissive of dictionaries as a concept. (Perhaps this even more so than the general calamity of the past Age explains the dearth of Avarin dictionaries.) Alendel could surely provide much more insight into many of the dialects, and Elrond keeps meaning to tell them about his side-project. He really does. But then he thinks how amusing it might be, surprising them one day by speaking in full sentences, and determines to continue the work in secret. 

The Chief of Staff does seem aware that Elrond is withholding something from them, but their suspicions are not drawn to the vocabulary lists in the margins of his ledgers. 

“You’re taller than you were last week.” 

Elrond looks up from his desk. Alendel is eating slices of radish, from their mid-afternoon appetizing plate—Elrond has already done away with most of the cured meat. They stare at him narrow-eyed as they chew. 

“I beg your pardon?” 

“And last week,” ( _crunch_ ) “you were taller than the week before.” 

Their gaze flicks down to the edge of Elrond’s pant-leg; between the cuff and his leather mules there is perhaps more skin than anticipated. 

“I don’t know if my ankles can bear this much more scrutiny, Alendel.” Elrond keeps at his work, aware of the beguiling edge on his voice. 

Yet the Chief of Staff is not charmed. Everyone seems to be more attracted to him lately, but the texture of Alendel’s attraction—so constant, so simmering over months, years—has changed. They look on him now with detached observation, scientific puzzlement. 

“That can’t be good for your tendons,” they mutter, bunching up a napkin. 

“My tendons are…improved.” Elrond smiles, trying to catch their eye. He has new tools at his disposal now to do this; can see, if he chooses, the strands of Music entwining them, could pluck them for chords of desire. “It only means your aunt’s arts are working, Alendel.” 

He thought they’d be happy about this. 

Yet his gaze is returned, defiantly, with no hint of beguilement on Alendel’s vexed face. 

“Does _she_ really think so?” 

Alendel is right. (How many times has Alendel been right? He’s long stopped keeping count.) Tenwi has been not a little wary of Elrond, since the day he arrived in distress, Music overwhelming his mind. Worried might be the better term, yet there is an edge of fear in her, too. She remarks on his physical changes, but distractedly, always searching him. 

Just as in the first moments after he awoke from his encounter with the Maia, Elrond knows he is holding up a veil across the true changes to his nature—feels it, in the new layer he perceives on the world. He is repelling her, in his thought, in its joining with the world of the Music. 

At least he thinks he is. After a few sessions where Elrond finds himself on the water alone, and wakes to Tenwi’s skeptical examination of his pore size, one afternoon she takes a long look at him and simply declares her answer to a question that hasn’t been asked. 

“So the Queen’s been among us.” 

Elrond looks up over his teacup. Somewhere, remorse crawls up his spine—yet its expression is repressed by cool detachment. He knows his gaze must be entrancing. Tenwi looks at him with a determination indicating a strong commitment to remaining unentranced. 

“Not exactly her,” Elrond says—smoothly, sweetly, with no hesitation. “I am my own person, you know.” 

Tenwi bows her head; he feels her relief, not having to look into his strange eyes. 

“Of course, love.” 

She leaves him to his tea, humming as she begins to put things away. Elrond watches, flickering into his Music-sight, where Tenwi vibrates nervously. 

“Are you concerned?” he hears himself ask calmly. “Was it not our goal, to reconcile me to my true nature? I am become an Elf, Tenwi.” 

Tenwi sighs—the formal register is a bit much, he knows. But she responds in kind. 

“More than an Elf. We have succeeded beyond what I imagined was possible. But tell me, Elrond, for…” She turns again to face him; her expression grave. “For I fear that in trying to help you I have led you to a strange fate.” 

“It does not seem strange to me,” says Elrond—though an inner voice affirms the strangeness, reaches in agreement, and yet dissolves into wordlessness before it can surface. 

“So is this truly what you wish for yourself?” 

Elrond feels powerful, centered. Beautiful. Sure. And strong, much stronger than he has ever been. 

“Yes,” he says, and no part of him can truly disagree. 

“And it feels…stable?” Tenwi asks. “That is what I fear, Elrond. Your _fae_ has its hidden dimensions. But your _rhaw_ …is not raiment, as hers was. It is flesh.” 

Elrond raises what he knows must be an especially charming brow. “Flesh that may be acted upon, by the will of the _fae_ , as you once explained to me in these very halls. Are you questioning your own methods, Tenwi? And those of Queen Melian, who instructed you?” 

He has troubled her, with this last question, more than she was troubled before—he can see the tremor of anxiety about her. 

Yet outwardly, Tenwi affixes slight smile. “My methods, as I’ve often said, have never before encountered one such as you. But I think now the student has become the teacher. You’ve always known how to do this, Elrond; I think I’ve just helped you to realize it.” 

Elrond lowers his eyes, for a brief moment shamed by Tenwi’s kindness—the feeling is strong, to penetrate his proud countenance. But he looks up again, in gratitude. 

“I think that is true-spoken, Lady.” 

Tenwi stands, shaking her head. 

“I cannot help you any longer. I will return soon to my kin; it seems my work in the city is ending.” 

Elrond nods, knowing the unspoken fact of Laswiniel. But Tenwi continues, a pained look on her face as she stalls in her re-ordering of the room. 

“This is beyond me now, my love,” she says. “I hope you will not come to begrudge an old Elf her good intentions.” 

Elrond stands. “Tenwi,” he says—knowing the reassurance, the kindness dripping from his speech. “Nothing is the matter! I bear only gratitude toward you.” 

She accepts a parting embrace, tentatively, tucking one of his braids behind his ear when they draw apart. 

The simple gesture stirs Elrond’s heart, whatever multiplex thing it has become. Before her—and without really deciding to—he becomes, as much as he can, the spirit of her old friend. 

It happens only for a moment, before he sees how Tenwi trembles before him, her eyes going wide and bewildered—senses her joy, wonder, terror, the line all too fine between the three. 

In an instant, Elrond draws himself back, and Tenwi places a hand against his chest. She pats gently, as if assuring herself of his solidness. 

“I apologize—” 

“—thank you.” Tenwi presses her eyes shut again, her hand traveling to take his. 

Even in the Music, Elrond is not sure if her thanks are for the momentary revelation, or its surcease. Everything is too mingled.

###

The harbor port at Harlond is reaching completion, thanks in no small part to improved project management by the Chief Councilor’s office. When the last tiles have been laid in the corniche—a magnificent tessellation in blue and silver stretching to the grand balustrade at the water’s edge—Elrond and Erestor lead the High King’s retinue on an inaugural tour.

It is a wind-whipped day in late spring, sunlight and cloud fighting for dominance of a roiled gray sky. Halfway through his walk-through of the naval berths, even implacable Erestor begs pardon to tie his hair back, a moment that every other Elf present takes as an opportunity to wrangle their own into sloppy ponytails. Gil-galad, for lack of a tie and pride of refusing any that is offered, stuffs his ceremonial braids down the collar of his greatcoat.

Yet Elrond remains unaffected by the elements, prepared to continue into the third hour of the planned agenda—an extensive survey of the pound locking system—when one of the red-cheeked courtiers of sundry Finwëan stock advances that they were promised lunch. Why these insufferable characters are given leave to interrupt the King’s senior advisers at any moment they please escapes Elrond, but everyone else in the party seems to be in agreement. 

“As you wish.” Elrond inclines his head. “We will resume after your repast.” 

He can’t help that his words are tipped with ire, but the way the crowd scatters at his voice, like a nest of mice poked with a broom, he knows he has failed to rein in his power. No matter. Elrond isn’t especially in need of lunch, feeling more nourished by the spirited tumult of Ossë’s waves. 

He senses the King’s approach, but stands unmoving at the balustrade as Gil-galad comes to his side. 

The King blinks against the wind and spitting water. 

“A word, Chief Councilor?” 

Elrond turns to him. “My liege.” 

The King will not meet his gaze. His own eyes seem distant, dimmed of their characteristic gleam. He looks out over the churning water with an ill aspect. When Elrond slips into the Music-sight, Gil-galad seems nearly seamless with the gray scenery that surrounds him, even in all his finery. 

Finally, the King summons his words. “You are changed.” 

“I am.” Elrond’s voice is patient, even. He is in perfect control of himself. “Lady Tenwi’s work has been achieved.” 

Gil-galad shakes his head. “Not so with Laswiniel.” 

For a moment it seems he might begin to weep openly; some reserve of royal dignity prevails, as he gathers a sigh. Elrond finds the movements of the sea to be far more interesting that this display, but his attention can be cast widely now. And so he watches the waves, calculating patterns and probabilities in their texture, and at the same time listens to what he already knows will be a tiresome lament. 

“People were awful to her, you know. Our whole youth. When she began living as…herself. All our friends—there were so few of us, who had been children together. Who survived, to even experience youth. No one really understood it. Or they thought she’d gone mad with grief for her family.” 

Detachedly, Elrond observes that the King’s voice is lower, graver than he is used to hearing; holding, but fraying, over a core of anguish. 

“So they pitied her, and comforted her; and then confronted her, when she would not return to being who she once had been. Said that her choice was…childish, or wrong, or even a blasphemy. Told her it _was_ a choice. As if it could be taken back.” Gil-galad swallows. “It was only when I chose her that anyone would be _decent_ again.” 

“Her valiant protector,” Elrond says, as cool as the wind lashing their faces. 

If Gil-galad is hurt by this, he is already far too sunken in misery to mind. He shakes his head. “Laswiniel protected herself during the war, for long years after we parted. When we found one another again—unlooked for, unhoped for, even—I simply knew that my choice was intact. I was only grateful that hers was as well.” 

He pauses, and now does look on his Chief Councilor. Once, Gil-galad had told Elrond he needed people willing to tell him when he was being an idiot. In this moment, Elrond knows he need not say anything at all. The King trembles at the strangeness he can no doubt perceive in him—the _change_ —but summons from some corner of his noble lineage a look of proud defiance. 

“My desire has only ever been that Laswiniel be made whole. As she _should_ be.” 

“As she must be for you to have her, and an heir of your own line,” Elrond clarifies evenly. “As she cannot be.” 

“If Tenwi could not,” Gil-galad begins—his own words now picked slowly, carefully, _desperately_ , so unlike the blithe banter of the King who Elrond had encountered at the end of the war—“and yet you, Lord Elrond, have managed to…summon some power of your ancestry, and change your form…might you…” 

Elrond can see the King’s fear now, spiky, jagged, propelling him inevitably forward into the helpless, foolish, determinedly _idiotic_ conclusion to his query. 

“Might you not also…help Laswiniel to change hers?” 

The question, finally, is whispered, barely heard in the whip of wind and sea. 

Elrond does not even know if such a thing is possible; has barely any understanding of the mechanism that has brought him to change, and whether he could yet turn it on others. He is only remembering Laswiniel’s pain, how she bore it with so little complaint—until determining, as was her right, to bear it no longer. That she was sufficient unto herself, without the King and his laws. 

“Please,” says Gil-galad, his voice now going ragged. “She’ll only be in the city a few days longer…and she adores you, and I cannot—” 

“Would Ereinion Gil-galad have me as his proprietary Power?” 

Elrond is showing nothing of the form he might, but his voice provides all the effect needed: rippling with condescension and cold rage. The High King stands stock-still, unwavering; frightened, perhaps, but not enough. 

“I thought only that…” 

“Would you have me level the mountains, to find silver ore for your ornament?” 

Elrond takes it up a notch—why not?—revealing himself flowing with the dark rivulets of an underground spring, with limbs entwining blue-black roots of long-drowned trees. Mushrooms sprouting at his feet, for some reason. 

Confronted with all this, the King does get considerably more frightened—and in equal measure, suddenly, wrathful, as ancestors of his (in some configuration) have been in confronting other powers. 

“Varda’s glistening _teat_ , Elrond—” 

“Or shall I drain the harbors for all their oyster-beds, at the King’s pleasure?” 

Elrond cannot do any of these things either, that he knows of. What he can do is continue to weave his raiment, so that the King might terrified into the lesson of his foolishness—his selfishness. Simple as a fable, as a folktale. 

Girls turning into bats; men turning into stars; women turning in birds; elves turning into men. If all of the rest of his family gets to be part of a folktale, why shouldn’t he have the chance? 

Elrond laughs, and some new clarity surges in him: that this is what Gil-galad has feared—was right to fear—all along, from the moment he made his highly strategic choice of a Chief Councilor. An authority greater than he, scion of the mightiest of the Noldor and Sindar both; scion of a god who once walked the earth. 

Now the Chief Councilor gathers all the fog of the harbor, until they are enveloped in a shroud that blots out the world, and High King of the Noldor is reduced to panicked glancing, total disorientation. 

Slowly, Elrond paces toward him, each footstep a solemn echo, a drumbeat in the great Theme. 

“How else shall the world be remade, after your fancy?” 

Gil-galad, cursing continually, disbelieving, stumbles backward—seems about to grab for the dagger on his belt, when his face falls. 

Elrond hears what might be the contours of his name, being called from a distant world, but then his body meets the stone, and all is dark.

###

Erestor is nothing if not a versatile person. He has been, in his day, a glassblower; a third-apprentice-blacksmith; a serviceable archer; a fur-trapper on the Grinding Ice; a farrier, transcriptionist, and occasional diplomat in the camps of Hithlum; a construction site supervisor in Vinyamar; a junior associate architect in Gondolin, assigned to the marketplaces; a senior associate architect in Gondolin, assigned first to the Tower of the King and then to years and years of interminable meetings about fountains.

Now he is thrice an architect, and very often a diplomat as well—not least between his junior colleagues (that would be _all_ of his colleagues). When the King and Chief Councilor wander off, Erestor keeps a watchful eye from the covered tent where lunch is being served, and where he is also now serving as host, given the conspicuous absence of Gil-galad and Elrond. And when Gil-galad and Elrond begin to get into some kind of altercation, which summarily leads to a display of eldritch conjuring—the bream in lemon sauce diverts the attention of his fellow diners—and then to Elrond collapsing on the pavement, Erestor rises from his seat and coughs gently. 

“Excuse me, but who among you has attained a higher than fourth-level certification in emergency healing?” 

Blank stares and interrupted swallows greet him across the floor. 

Erestor sighs, straightens his robes, and sets off to further demonstrate his versatility.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Windan and Kindi are two of the named tribes of the Avari. (Tenwi is of Kindi extraction, in-universe.)


	17. Alone, Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas 2 me in the form of _more_ elrond therapy.

**Alone, Again**

“Is he breathing?!” 

“Yes, my liege, as I’ve already assured you several times—” 

“—but that could change at any moment!” 

“It was very much still the case, as of fifteen seconds ago.” 

“Can’t I go in there?” 

“You are the King, and you can do as you please, but you _ought_ not to unless you would like to get cursed out in archaic Sindarin. Hwenleth, have you managed to locate Alendel?” 

“Yes, Lord Erestor, they’re on their—” 

“—already here. Pardon me, but pray tell: what the fuck has happened?” 

“Alendel! Thank Gods! I nearly killed Elrond!” 

“It was rather more the other way around—” 

“Your aunt! We must send for her at once!” 

“So _now_ you’ll deign to publicly acknowledge her? A bit late-coming, _my liege_.” 

“She’s gone?!” 

“Yesterday. Erestor, what do I need to know?” 

“If Tenwi is indeed no longer disposed to, you should speak with the healers…” 

“Why does _Alendel_ get to speak with the healers?!”

“Hwenleth, please escort the King to his study. And send to the kitchen for a bottle of cordial. And a sandwich.” 

“My lord…erm…my liege…I…” 

“I’m not a _child_ , Erestor.” 

“ _Go._ ”

###

Elrond is lost, for what feels like a very long time.

It is not like the sessions with Tenwi; not like the fugues he’s inadvertently induced via intoxication. The closest is the state that preceded the attack of Music, but now the Music seems to be fully parted from his being—to have untethered him in shapelessness and namelessness. 

And solitude. The only thing he knows is that he is alone, without even the shades of himself he has confronted over the past months. 

He supposes, after a while, that he must be dead. That the Elf thing hasn’t quite worked out, because there are no Halls, no waiting spirits, no Lord of Doom on a shadowed throne. 

Nor is there any sorrow. 

Perhaps, then, he has been granted the gift of Men. 

He wonders at this, but not in fear, or anger. Emotion does not seem to take hold here. Wherever lies the continual mourning of Arda, the marred theme, it does not touch this place. 

After a time, he has a body again. It is familiar, worn in places. Tired. Somehow, he has pajamas on—always pajamas, isn’t it—but these are less familiar, made of fine white linen with a red and gold brocade at the collar and sleeves. 

He is glad of them, though, when he hears a voice calling his name. He is _named_ again. 

It is a voice he has not heard in too long. 

Elrond runs. 

It is not as if there is a path to run against, or even a surface, only an ever-shifting convergence of color and light. Yet it seems to resolve, somewhere in the distance: there is a room, and kneeling in the center of the room a Man. 

“Brother?” 

Elrond slows on his approach, not quite believing his sight after being so long surrounded by formlessness. And at the shock of seeing Elros, who looks thin and worn-down: his face weathered, beard scraggly, clothes patched. His chamber appears to be not much grander than a cottage, with timber walls and straw scattered on the floor. 

His eyes are out-of-focus; though Elrond comes to stand directly before him Elros cannot seem to perceive this fully. 

“Elrond… _honeg_...?” 

Elros reaches out his hand, and Elrond takes it, somehow not surprised to find they are solid to one another. 

Elros laughs in disbelief. “You’re there.” 

“I am,” says Elrond, the shape of speech strange in his mouth. 

Elros does not move, only tightens his grip. “I was dreaming I lost you.” His voice is low and distant, his gaze still faraway. “That you…left the world, and I could understand no longer the meaning of any of it. I have always looked to you to see—” 

“What you are not?” 

Elrond finds no anger in his voice, only inquiry. 

Elros shakes his head. 

“What _we_ are. Together. Even…parted across the sea. Even when Maedhros used to make us nearly kill each other on the sparring grounds.” 

Elrond comes down to his knees, level with Elros. “Some brothers think it is their purpose to hasten each other’s destruction.” 

“I will not hasten yours,” says Elros. 

Elrond shakes his head, though he knows that Elros cannot see. “You never have.” 

Elros scatters his hands, searching for the shape of Elrond’s shoulders. Finding him, he pulls his brother into a tight embrace. 

“I would, were I to abandon you in this place.” 

The hollow of his brother’s neck—how often he had hidden, wept, languished here. Years ago. Slept on his shoulder. When they were almost one body. 

“Perhaps I prefer formlessness,” Elrond hears himself say. 

Form is troublesome, a trap. Or rather he had a form, once, was part of a perfect paradigm, a double image. But that mirror was broken, and now he drifts, unattached. 

It is his choice, should he take it, to leave behind Arda. To leave behind all mourning, all sorrow. 

“No,” says Elros, gripping at his arms, as he once did in the camp of the Valar. “Not while I live—not while the world is still being _defined_ , Elrond. Not while you are needed.” 

Outside the confines of Elros’s ghostly chamber, the ether spins with colors never before comprehended. Elrond does not feel needed. He does not feel any sense of meaning, any fell purpose. 

Here there is no braided burden of legacy and lineage. 

But then here is his brother, holding him close—close as he did the last time they nearly lost everything. 

“ _Stay_ ,” Elros says through gritted teeth. 

Elrond shuts his eyes.

###

And opens them again…elsewhere.

He is in a bed—an astonishingly comfortable one—with a duvet cover that matches the brocade on his pajamas. Amber sunlight filters through bay windows. 

Someone is humming, in a way that feels deeply familiar. 

_Maglor?_ , Elrond finds himself about to say. 

Yet when he looks for the source of the sound, someone else is sitting at his bedside. 

“Ah! You’re awake.” 

Elrond’s eyes go wide. 

_Both_ Elronds. 

He is imperfected, older. And yet young still. Smiling. Longer hair. Wearing _very_ nice clothes. Everything, in fact, is very nice—suspiciously nice, from the thread-count on the sheets to the exquisitely carved furniture, to the scent on the air. Like gardenias and incense and library-books. 

Elrond-the-Younger lurches backward, gathering the coverings to himself. “ _You._ ” 

“Me, again.” Elrond-the-Older seems sheepish, briefly, before he comes forward, laying a hand to his forehead in a businesslike manner. “No fever. That’s good.” 

Elrond tries to recoil again, as his older counterpart gently—though without asking permission—pries open each of his eyelids. 

“What do you mean, fever? Is this even my body? Am I even _here_?”

“Twice over.” 

Elrond-the-Older actually winks, as he draws back into his chair. 

“Is this amusing to you?” Elrond furrows his brow at himself, which only seems to further amuse his conversation partner. 

“Only because you haven’t just ejected us both out of existence.” 

Elrond looks down at his hands, sees the scaly patches and bitten cuticles. “This all happened to you as well, then, didn’t it?” 

“ _Happened_ , you say. I don’t know about that. _Is_ happening, perhaps. Always is, always will be. Healing is a continual process.” 

“You are healer, now? And you healed me?” 

“Yes, and no.” 

Elrond smirks. “I don’t like this thing where I ask questions and you provide highly unsatisfactory answers.” 

It is Elrond-the-Older’s turn to furrow. “I am a healer. So are you. But so is our brother, though he doesn’t often get the chance to practice.” He gets up, trailing over to the window, which he unlatches—letting in runs of preternaturally lovely birdsong. “It is Elros you have to thank this time.” 

“It really was him,” Elrond wonders. He doesn’t need to make it into a question. 

Elrond-the-Older nods as he squints into the sunlight. “Yes. He might have thought he was dreaming, but he came to us in our hour of need. Hmm.” 

Something seems to catch his sight out the window; he cups hands over his eyes and smiles. 

“Hawfinches! Fantastic.” Elrond-the-Older looks back at Elrond. “It’s the migration. Wonderful birding, the past few weeks.”

He observes a few more moments, as Elrond wonders when he will come to learn the particular names of all the creatures in the new world. 

“Anyway,” his counterpart continues, half an eye out the window still. “I believe that has been the import of the whole ordeal: to learn that we’re far more connected to our brother than we ever realized. That when you are one of two remaining _peredhel_ in the world, the idea of becoming something else is rather beside the point. I am sorry about what you had to go through to find out.” 

Violent memories file into Elrond’s consciousness: the surge of power in his limbs, ancient waters gathered at his command, terrifying quantities of mushrooms—and Gil-galad stumbling before him, wrathful as if confronted by the Enemy of old. 

Terror and remorse bolt up his spine. “Did I hurt the King?” 

Elrond-the-Older chuckles. “Don’t worry about the King. He has reason to be far more worried about you. And you shouldn’t blame yourself, per se.” 

Elrond sinks back onto the pillows. “The Maia…”

Was he rid of it? Was this the work of healing? 

“With us, still. Doing all…this.” His counterpart walks back toward the other side of the bed, gesturing about the finely appointed room. “And a bit contrite, I’m sure. I think that’s why you’re here. That part of us is powerful, but it only wants to act on what we desire. Some of the Maiar are rather predisposed to that—desiring. Though not all.”

Elrond looks up. “So anytime I _desire_ to pay a visit to my cryptic future self, I should simply have another nervous breakdown, nearly commit murder _and_ high treason, and go off to haunt Elros in his nightmares?” 

Elrond-the-Older sits, folding hands on his elaborately embroidered lap. “No. I don’t think you will see me again for a very long time.”

“You mean, not until I _am_ you?” 

His counterpart gathers his thoughts. “With our nature, we do get glimpses into the underlying simplicity of the world—seeing that everything that seems separate, bounded by category, or by time, is in fact part of a single wholeness. You and I, in vastly different eras of our life, are in fact always in this room. Our brother, lost to across the sea and to history, to the race of Men— he has never left our side. He holds us as he did at Sirion.” 

They look at one another, and the vast sadness that Elrond has so often resisted, and more recently given into, seems to settle between them like a tide: even, for now, though with the promise of steady ebb and flow. 

“But moments of this pure understanding are fleeting,” says Elrond-the-Older. “We do not have the _hröa_ sufficient to fully fathom the gifts of Melian, though they were still given to us freely. Nor do our other gifts fully…fit together, the Elf and the Man. There’s always going to be something wrong with you, Elrond.” 

He smiles as his says this, a quiet wildness in his eyes. 

Elrond finds himself suddenly infuriated. 

“But you said—that night all those months ago…you told me I was an Elf!”

“I said that is what you _chose_ to be. Seeing as lately you’ve been terrifying all your friends with quasi-divinity, I think we can agree that our best intentions are not always predictive of their outcomes.” 

“But _you._ Aren’t you an Elf?” 

Elrond-the-Older shrugs. “Some say.” 

“And Elros…he is a Man?” 

“He was granted their gift.” 

“Is that what that place was?” 

“I do not know.” 

This admission softens something between them. 

“Is Elros all right?” Elrond asks quietly. 

His counterpart sighs, shaking his head. “Those were not easy years, for him. But he is strong, and proud, and stubborn, as you well know. And he’ll tell you all about it himself, soon enough.” 

Elrond-the-Older’s eyes dart over to the door, a split-second before some insistent fist starts pounding on it. 

“ _Atya!_ ” calls a child’s muffled voice (or two?). 

Elrond’s face must betray both panic (children?!) and confusion (Quenya-speaking children?!). His host stands calmly, raising his voice to a somewhat terrifying register. 

“Not now!” 

When the small feet scatter away, he smiles again. “We’d better get you out of here before you see something you’re not supposed to.” 

Elrond raises a brow. “Or someone who’s not supposed to see me?” 

Elrond-the-Older takes this into consideration. “I’m not certain that they could, frankly. But what I really can’t have is people thinking I stand around talking to my furniture.” 

These are his parting words to himself. Elrond-the-Older lays a hand again to his forehead, and takes up again the hummed melody, this time sung just over the breath. Music unfolding, Music unending and indifferent, but gently pulled, for a moment, into the shape of healing.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honeg = Sindarin term for "little brother" :') 
> 
> Atya = Quenya for dad/daddy. (Why Elrond's kids call him dad in Quenya...a headcanon for another day)


	18. Everyone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW for discussion of transphobia. 
> 
> woof. looking forward to a more canon-compliant project so i don't have write an extremely long penultimate chapter featuring More Elves Having Conversations About What Happened in this Fic, Anyway? had fun with it, though. one more to go! thanks anyone who has stuck around with this.

**Everyone**

When he actually wakes up, on a much less comfortable cot in the Forlond infirmary, Erestor is sitting at the bedside with a pencil clutched in his teeth. He is so engrossed in a pile of blueprints divided between his lap and a makeshift desk on the windowsill that Elrond observes silently for several minutes, from his vantage on the pillow, before the architect even notices he has opened his eyes. 

It is just as well, because Elrond is not certain he remembers how to speak. When the words finally occur to him, he is even less certain of the appropriate greetings for the situation. _Well-met_? _Salutations_? _Hail, Lord Erestor_? 

He settles on a groggy, “Hi.” 

Erestor’s eyes go wide, tucking his pencil into his top-knot as he laughs in genuine delight—a rare enough occurrence that Elrond is already overwhelmed by the time he swoops in for an even rarer embrace. 

“Oh, you ridiculous boy!” Erestor actually _kisses_ him, on the forehead. Vigorously. “You haven’t left us after all.” 

The slight pressure on his skin leads Elrond to discover that he aches all over—externally, internally, interstitially, in the ether of his eyeballs and the uneven gaps between certain of his teeth, now re-disordered. 

Gingerly, he feels his face, finding at least three days’ beard growth. 

“How long was I…?” 

“Two weeks, just about. We’ve been trying to convince them to get you home, to your own bed, but they’ve been worried about moving you again. You’ve been completely beyond the reach of every song in the healers’ repertoire, and Alendel has been trying to send a messenger to Tenwi but her party must be halfway through the eastern mountains, a fool’s errand—not to mention the head physician has had much to comment on with regard to peculiar Avarin therapeutics…” 

“It’s not— _hrrgh_ …” Attempting to raise up on his elbows, Elrond discovers a formidable migraine. He gives up, collapsing back to the pillow. “Not Tenwi’s fault.” 

“Elrond.” Erestor reaches to brush the greasy hair off his face—the shade Elrond sometimes sees in him of Maglor suddenly visible, a paternal solicitude that makes his heart well and skin crawl simultaneously. “They knew you were alive, by your vitals, but your _fëa_ …It was as my aunt, in the gardens of Estë. We were beginning to lose hope you might return.”

The concern in his voice makes Elrond doubly uneasy, not only because of the apparent vigil that the medical community and all of his colleagues have been keeping over him. 

“Wasn’t anyone worried that…something else might return in my stead?” 

Erestor settles back into his chair, unease now crossing his face as well. “We were, yes.” 

“Did I not threaten the High King?” 

“I think that is a matter of your word, and his.” Erestor crosses his arms. “I’m still not sure what I saw, Elrond. But it didn’t seem to be you. And you’d only been half-you, for some time before that. This,”—he strokes Elrond’s shoulder (the most Erestor has ever _touched_ him has been contained to these past few minutes, a phenomenon both oddly comforting and quite disconcerting)—“seems more like you. Do you feel more like you?” 

If Erestor means like his body is waging a subcutaneous war against itself, then yes, he supposes he does. Elrond gently removes his hand. 

“I presume I am dismissed from my station?” 

Erestor scoffs. “The King didn’t have a scratch on him.” 

“Erestor…could you kindly provide a realistic assessment of my— _Elbereth_! Ow.” 

“There, there—don’t jostle yourself, I shouldn’t have agitated you. And no, I haven’t heard any ominous rumors about your employment prospects. The King has only displayed the utmost anxiety about your care—believe me, I’ve been fielding plenty of it. Since Alendel won’t.” 

A dreadful frisson creeps up Elrond’s chest cavity. “Did you tell Alendel what happened?”

“Alendel had to tell _me_ what they thought was happening. And the healers. I think when they see you, they’ll be very apologetic about breaching your privacy—but it was an emergency, after all.” 

Elrond blinks up at the ceiling. “It was.” 

The edges of his perception feel wooly, dulled—is this how it had always been, before? 

“Where’s my sense? I should call the healers.” Erestor reaches behind to the windowsill, producing a handbell. “I don’t think I’m being any help at all, forcing you to chat when you’ve just gotten out of a coma. It’s only just good to see you, Elrond.” 

Elrond half-smiles. “I’m glad to see you, too. No need to kiss me again.” 

“Oh, but it’s _very_ tempting.” 

Erestor pats his cheek. Then he rings the bell, and in moments Elrond is descended upon by the entire infirmary staff, and between the pulse-taking and the reflex-measuring and the probing and poking of various areas there is no room for kissing at all.

###

No one seems able to accept the conclusion that he has healed himself.

Elrond is examined, and then interrogated, for two full days after regaining consciousness—in _this_ realm, at least, the realm where he belongs. At least so he would have thought, before the events of the past several weeks. Now everything feels more uncertain, the unease he’s always felt within his body now extended to his position in space and time. 

The disorientation is such that Elrond has little energy to expend on embarrassment. He explains to the healers as plainly as he can that he is a descendent of Melian, Queen of Doriath, that he had come into contact with a remnant of her spirit, and that this was somehow both the incitation of and the resolution to his episode. 

He explains the situation a second time to the senior officers of the Royal Guard, which more emphasis on the fact that he has no future plans for eldritch intimidation, supernaturally facilitated coups or assassination attempts. 

No one would believe him, Elrond is sure, if he weren’t so weakened he can barely stand. 

Alendel brings him home in a hired carriage. They have been a near-constant presence, since Erestor sent for them the first day, but a strangely quiet one, their remarks limited to questioning the nurses about his herbal prescriptions. Now they ride together in silence, a bright spring morning passing by. Elrond reaches for Alendel’s hand. They allow him to. 

This modest conjoining takes on practical use as soon as he has to confront the stairs. 

When he is propped up on the daybed, and tea has been organized, and there isn’t a single practicality remaining between them, Elrond finally says it. 

“I’m sorry.” 

He means this to be sincere, emphatic; it comes out breathless and faint. 

Alendel is sitting on a chair opposite him, staring into their teacup. “I’m the one who ought to apologize.” 

Elrond frowns. “For what?”

Alendel blows errant hair-strands out of their face, gathering words in frustration. 

“I do feel upset, Elrond. Not _at_ you.” 

Elrond isn’t sure he believes this. Alendel sighs at his raised eyebrow. 

“No one but you truly understands what has happened, and yet I’ve had to be the one explaining my very partial understanding of the matter to people who have a _lot_ of follow-up questions, the past few weeks. Justifying the fact that I, who have _never_ accepted attempts to categorize my person—any binaries, on any axis—encouraged you to pursue the far side of such a binary. Pursuit that in the end has harmed you, gravely.” 

They cradle their forehead. “And then I’ve blighted my aunt’s reputation, in the process, and precipitated a…political incident, or however the King is feeling about it, I’m truly uncertain.” 

None of this is a comfort to Elrond, but his impulse is still to give comfort to Alendel—what little he can spare. 

“I don’t think any of us knew what we were dealing with,” he says. “Myself least of all.” 

“Exactly!” Alendel cries. “I shouldn’t have…urged you. You seemed so unhappy—so angry with yourself, just for being who you are. But I _was_ happy with you, Elrond. I…loved you. I _do_ love you. I should have shown you by keeping on loving you as you were. As you are. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to give you happiness.” They swallow. “As did Tenwi. Though more for reasons of professional interest, at least at first.” 

Elrond shakes his head. 

“But you have brought me happiness, Endi. In ways I couldn’t even begin to explain. That you wouldn’t believe.” 

Alendel looks wary, and like they badly want to interrupt, but he continues. 

“Yes, it was very strange, and evidently dangerous, in the end, and I still think I might get thrown out of the kingdom as soon as I can lift my arms above my head, but…it was worth it, for what I know now. About what I am.” 

Even though he should have known all along, even when it is the most obvious fact of his nature: _peredhel_. 

“For that I can only be grateful,” Elrond concludes. “Why are you staring at me like that?” 

“When did you learn to speak Windan?” 

Alendel poses the question back to him in the Avarin dialect. 

“Oh.”

“Your accent is…” (they switch back to Sindarin), “…idiosyncratic.” 

“I…suppose because I learned from a very poor Nargothrin lexicon. And Veszti. It was meant to be a surprise? I think.” 

“Then it has succeeded, as a surprise.” 

“I only studied for…ten days, perhaps?” Elrond mutters, rifling through his mind; his memories of his time under the Maia’s influence, tutelage, _control_ , whatever it was meant to be—they are hard to comprehend. Not because they are hazy, or misremembered: there is simply too much information stored in them, and in the recall it comes out jumbled. 

Alendel goes quiet for a moment, drinking their long-disregarded tea. 

“You scared me, you know,” they say. 

“I scared myself,” says Elrond. “And still do. I fear it will be long before I can regain your trust. Or anyone’s.” 

Alendel shifts in their seat. “That…aspect of you. Is it still there?” 

“Yes.” 

“Can you control it?” 

Elrond knows his silence is no comfort to Alendel, but the answer to their question is difficult to put to words. 

“That is not the word I would use. I think that striving for _control_ of any aspect of my nature would…hasten the imbalance that led us here.” 

Alendel casts their eyes down. “The imbalance we led you to.” 

Elrond smiles. “But through it I’ve gained a better understanding of balance. That it is not perfection. I will never be an Elf, or a Man, but I will always be both at the same time; that is the strangeness in me, and if it comes in part from the Maia, the other part is that I am simply…strange. There’s always going to be something wrong with me.” 

Words he’d heard from himself, and that had rankled, at the time. Yet they now seem to be the truest he knows. 

Alendel—Endi—gets up and crosses the floor, coming to stand above him. Elrond takes their hand.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” they say. 

“That you wouldn’t have said two weeks ago, so I am glad to hear it. Now sit.” Elrond pats the cushion beside him. “Please.” 

“Elrond, you’re—”

“Myself. Truly. I promise.”

“—I meant you look like you’re about to fall asleep again.” 

“Then fall asleep with me.” 

They sit, and Elrond lowers himself, resting his head in their lap. 

Alendel strokes his hair absently. “I should give you plaits. Otherwise you’ll wake up all tangled.” 

They start weaving long, simple pigtails. Elrond is too tired to feel ridiculous; he lets Alendel’s touch coax some of the pain out of him, sighing. 

“If the King dismisses me, what am I going to do?” 

Alendel pulls a fastener from their own hair tie one of the braids off. “I’ll make sure he dismisses me, as well, and we’ll move the Greenwood.” 

“We?” Elrond turns an eye up. “As what? Business partners?” 

“Mm. Administrators for hire.” 

“Administrators…who kiss?” 

Alendel laughs. “You’re making me feel even more than usual like I am taking advantage of your youthful naivete.” 

“I’m quite aged for a _half_ -Elf. My brother and I are proof that my parents were engaging in the sacred act well before Eldarin majority.” 

“So you did come to learn how little Elves are made, after all. Or half-Elves.” 

“Still haven’t, no. Plenty of insight on erogenous zones, though.” 

“Is that so.” Alendel strokes the outer curve of his exposed earlobe. 

Elrond leans into the touch. “And you’re quite young for an Elf, aren’t you, so it’s more like we’re meeting in the mid—” 

For the first time, the kiss is on the lips. 

Elrond finds he likes it this way. 

Eventually, and unfortunately, Alendel breaks away. 

“Now I really am taking advantage of your convalescence,” they say, but they smile. 

Elrond shifts. “Or is it— _ow_ —that _I’m_ taking advantage of your sympathies?” 

Alendel ties off the second braid and extracts themself from the embrace, in the most loving manner possible. 

“You need to rest.” 

“I’m finding this to be _quite_ restful.” 

Shouldering their outer robes again, Alendel smirks. “When you really _are_ rested, we can resume matters. As it happens, I read an informative leaflet recently on non-procreative sex.” 

“A most unkind thing to say to me just when you’re leaving!” 

They come forward kiss him again, only on the forehead. 

“Sleep. You don’t want to know how behind you’ve put me in my work. Erestor or I will be back in a few hours.” 

Elrond makes further noises of protest. Yet once Alendel is gone, he drifts, soon enough, into mercifully uneventful unconsciousness.

###

There are visitors besides Alendel and Erestor, to his surprise. Celebrimbor arrives one afternoon with an entire seabass, proceeding to grill it over the underutilized firepit in Elrond’s small back garden, and then in spite of much objection to carry Elrond downstairs for dinner. The edge of summer on the air, the well-cooked fish—‘Brimbor knows his way around more than one type of fire—and the smith’s companionable silence all make Elrond grateful, in the end, for the intrusion.

Hwenleth comes when Elrond’s other caretakers are indisposed, a bit trepidatious at first, though the edge seems to come off her nerves once she sees the state he is in. She even indulges him with a packet of correspondence detailing price increases from the Dwarven mining syndicate. 

No one will otherwise tell him when he’s supposed to return to work. 

This bothers Elrond in the beginning, but as the days pass by—each of them bringing him marginally more strength, more clarity—he realizes that, whether or not it is decided for him, the employ of the High King may no longer be his settled fate. 

Perhaps he is not meant to return. 

Like Eärendil before him, and Elwing. 

Maglor. Elros. 

A bit of a family tradition, isn’t it, walking away from the history of the Noldor into some strange new song. 

If Alendel is serious about going away with him, Elrond could pass well enough for Sinda in the eastern forests. (Is he not the heir of Elu Thingol, of Lúthien and Dior?) Apart from the retained fluency in bastardized pan-Avarin, the Maia has left at least one other remnant: the considerable thinning of his beard. The growth after he shaves now is slow, and the hair fine. Diminishing, one might say. 

Elrond doesn’t ask himself whether it has all been worth it, for this one small change. It’s not the right question. 

He works on a much-belated reply to Lady Galadriel’s last letter: 

_You warned me of the power of Melian, embedded within my person, and the possible dangers of unraveling its nature. You were right to do so. There have been deleterious effects and consequences. Perhaps accounts of this have already reached the shores of Lake Evendim._

(Outside the letter-paper’s margins, Elrond draws eight-pointed stars on the blotter—old habit—thinking through the best way to phrase this.) 

_Yet if it was unwise of Lady Tenwi to assist me in this matter, and unwise of me to accept her assistance, then I think I shall need to continue my study of unwisdom before pursuing its converse. You spoke of the consequences of sub-creation gone awry, of questioning the perfection of the Theme. But at a risk of sounding solipsistic—and I think I shall have to, for the duration—I am in my embodiment proof of the Theme’s malleability. For many years—though perhaps someday I will reckon them few—this strangeness has been a grief to me. It was the sundering of my family, the confusion of my body and spirit. Yet I am starting to learn what my brother, in choosing to be counted among Men (not to mention made their King), must be further along in understanding: our strangeness means something to the world._

_You, my Lady, have told me as such, but if I may be bold, I would venture that even you have yet to perceive the full shape of that meaning. Nor have I, of course, but I see dimly the trajectory of one curve: that I am capable of showing others that the world, the Theme, is more adaptable than we think, and more strange. And less beholden to the example of the Valar, and their laws imparted to us. I know you have felt this from the first stirrings of your heart to depart Aman, though the road away was fell and perilous: that rebellion happens not only among peoples, but within bodies, and hearts. I think the Creator, in giving us form, must account for it, rather than expect adherence to however that form is perceived by others—nís or nér, Elf or Man. I think this because He has willed me to exist, in a state that will never fully conform to anyone’s expectations—least of all my own._

_There is, as you say, guidance the world will require in the Ages to come, that you perceive my hand with yours at the helm. I submit that it would be wise to be informed by those who have walked longer on these shores than I, or even you. Tenwi is such a one; if her people have not seen the Light, they know more deeply the strangeness which is equally the substance of Eru, of which Melian was a strand; of which I carry a splinter. I will not discount the wisdom of the Tawarwaith, respectfully, any more than I would ever doubt your teachings as a Noldo and Teler. All have been integral to my education._

Elrond makes sure to couch this response in lengthy digressions on birdwatching, for Celeborn. 

There is other correspondence to divert himself with: a note to Tenwi, who has by now received word of both his affliction and slow recovery, telling her to please not delay reunion with her people for his sake; a second letter to his brother, though he’s yet to receive a reply to the first, providing what he hopes will be hopeful context to the addled ramblings he half-remembers composing all those weeks ago. 

A letter has also arrived from Laswiniel, now departed for Círdan’s havens. Elrond leaves it on his desk, seal unbroken, for a day or so after Hwenleth brings it to him. He is anxious of its contents, and his fears are rewarded immediately following the opening well-wishes and pleasantries: 

_Ereinion says it was his mention of me that first incited you to wrath, and subsequently to the swoon to which they thought you might be lost forever. I must say it is hard to comprehend the events of that afternoon, and each time the King recounts it the tale grows stranger in the telling. But I am pained to have played a part in any of it, Elrond. It is a shame that convention has relegated us all to private confession and confrontation, on matters I would be glad to discuss openly—yes, were it safe, were it uninteresting to gossip. Were it a different world._

_Unfortunately, mine is a life lived on a narrow walkway between disclosures. I did not think it could bear the scrutiny of a royal marriage; only my love for the King persuaded me momentarily to attempt fitting my life into an impossible shape, for his sake. And now for my sake he has relented; we will never marry, not in the manner of the Eldar, not until the laws are changed or the King renounces his kingship. Whether our love persists otherwise after our own fashion is a question I am too weary to contemplate at the moment, though I suppose I will come around to it eventually._

_Ereinion accepts this, and what part your strange outburst played in his acceptance I cannot say. I will not thank you, Elrond, because I am not grateful that anyone has come to strife for my honor, not when I did not and would not have asked for it. I do know there is a thread that binds us together, through Tenwi, which might have compelled you, and for that I will be grateful. As I am for your recovery, which the King reports to me, though it does not seem he has witnessed it in person. I am not certain he deserves this, but still something in me wishes you to be gentler with him, in your next encounter, than you were on the last._

Elrond rereads this section repeatedly—sometimes feeling more guilty, sometimes less, and always about something different.

###

His physical frailty makes it easier to accept the fact that he is functionally on house arrest. Among his regular visitors is a senior warden of the Royal Guard, who seems to be dispatched to assess whether his professed lack of intention to harm the King again was sincere.

Elrond supposes he could seem to be plotting something between his writing-desk and daybed. But one afternoon when the warden finds him in his back garden (with practice, he’s been able to make down the stairs of his own accord), she is accompanied by a new visitor. 

When the High King lowers his hood, Elrond is confused for a moment by his appearance, and not certain of why until he realizes he has never seen Gil-galad without a crown or circlet. Indeed, his whole person is less adorned than usual; he wears simple dark-blue robes, and no ornament on his ears, or fingers, or at his throat, or even woven into his hair. 

After probably too long of a moment, Elrond raises himself to bow. 

The King waves him down. “Oh, sit. And might I?” 

Elrond nods, indicating the twin of his wrought-iron patio chair. Gil-galad looks over to his guardsman as lowers himself. 

“Ereglas was just going to get us some delicacies. What’s that shop with the lavender shortbread? You know the one.” 

Elrond does; it is at least a half-mile away. The warden looks wary, but she departs with a bow. 

“She does not seem happy to leave you alone with me,” Elrond observes. 

The King shrugs. “They wouldn’t have let me come if they had cause to think you were any threat.” 

“Do you?” 

Gil-galad lowers his eyes, but he smiles. “You are my own trusted Chief Councilor. Tell me, should I feel threatened?” 

Elrond considers this. “I was not aware I was still in your employ.” 

“Well, now you are.” 

The silence between them fills with birdsong. Spring migration; Elrond has noted in his journal at least fifteen unforeseen varietals of swallow, lured to the garden with crumbs. 

There are many things he could ask the King, or apologies he could offer, all of which circle the question Elrond finally determines to proceed with: 

“Are you all right?” 

Gil-galad laughs, at length. 

“I’ll take that as…” 

“—I am fine, thank you. Considering.” 

“Laswiniel is gone.” 

“That she is.” 

“I am sorry.” 

“Well, _I’m_ not. She’s getting away from me, and all my…absurdities. I’m glad of that, for her. I wish I could say the same of myself.” 

The King bites his lower lip. Without any of his raiment, he looks very young. He _is_ very young, by the reckoning of Elves; perhaps even younger than Elrond is by the yet-to-be-determined reckoning of half-Elves. 

“At least your absurdities haven’t possessed you to attempt treasonous acts of eldritch intimidation,” Elrond offers apologetically. 

The King’s laughter at this is less fraught. 

“So are we to have Melian to blame, anytime you cock up henceforward?”

Elrond isn’t sure whether it might be the other way around. He shakes his head. 

“That part of me is…dormant now, I think. It seemed to need a means to introduce itself; I conveniently provided one. Now it knows it isn’t suited to quotidian matters of governance. Perhaps it has other purposes. At any rate I don’t think it will come forth again, unless I go through the considerable difficulty of summoning it.” 

“‘It’,” says Gil-galad. “Don’t you mean ‘her’?” 

This is a good question, and Elrond marvels, a little, that the King is the first to have asked it. Yet as he tries to formulate a response, Gil-galad shifts the subject. 

“You’re not the only one who has come to strange insights about his origins recently. With everything”—he gestures vaguely—“Erestor deigned to finally let me in on an extended-family secret. Something he could easily have done at any other point when the matter has arisen; yet perhaps it is a part of my penance, after all I did to keep silent around Laswiniel.” 

He sighs, as Elrond looks on expectantly. 

“Well?” 

“Do you remember, in lay of the rescue from Thangorodrim, how there’s that preamble of all the names of Fingon?” 

“More or less,” Elrond says. “I mean, that was one of Maglor’s; he just probably didn’t sing it very often. Not by the time I came around.” 

“Ever-Valiant, shining hair-commander, firstborn son of Nolofinwë, et cetera, et cetera. It goes on at length. Rather shoehorned in there, I’m sure Maglor didn’t deem it his finest work—it’s a drag on what is otherwise a _total_ banger.” 

Elrond hums the few bars that come back to him. “A banger indeed.” 

“Anyway,” the King nods, “all that nomenclature is a bit of political throat-clearing, a gesture from the Fëanorian to the Nolofinwëan camp legitimizing the new High Prince, and his heroics, and thereby the new High King as well. That much is obvious. What was new to me is the fact that this was the first time any of those names was used publicly, in official proclamation.” 

Elrond’s brow knits. “Was Findekáno not his father-name from birth?” 

“There was another name, before that; Erestor did not offer it, nor would I ask that it be given.” Gil-galad takes a breath. “A _nís_ ’s name.” 

Unfortunately, Elrond’s first reaction to this is astounded laughter. 

“Really?!” 

“If we are to take Erestor’s word, which I tend to.” 

“How in Arda…” Elrond turns over the scope of the revelation. “But so many knew Fingon from childhood, among the exiles.” 

Gil-galad tents his fingers, launching in an explanation that he appears bewildered by himself.

“It seems Fingolfin made sure it was never spoken of, that it was not to be discussed with younger generations. And the prohibition holds. Once Fingon returned triumphant, having released his beloved cousin from thralldom, he simply became Nolofinwë’s son and heir. And shortly thereafter the High Prince, as he is known to history.”

“No wonder Turgon built his own city.” 

“Yes, I suppose we can extend your great-grandfather some sympathies, in this situation. A matter of optics, I imagine; Fingon was the Great Re-unifier. The problem of his…deviance must have been conveniently forgotten afterward. Which is absolutely the only explanation I can muster for why none of my cousins has ever slurred this at me.” 

Elrond thinks of Galadriel’s letter. “Not all have forgotten, I’m sure.” 

“Or they simply have no idea how to talk about it openly.” Gil-galad sighs. “Which I can understand, given my own…” 

Now he groans, taking his face into his hands. 

Elrond supposes he could say something comforting, but he is too busy drawing conclusions. 

“And so the conclusion to this ironical turn of events—” 

“—is that I was borne to Fingon.” The King recovers himself. “As I have always suspected, if not in the manner I suspected.” 

“And your…sire?” There has to be a better word, but not that Elrond can find on short notice. 

Gil-galad raises his hands, allowing silence to indicate the obvious answer. 

“Ah.” 

“Who else? Things might have been simpler if I’d turned up with red hair.” 

“Or more complicated.” Elrond tilts his head, scrutinizing the King’s uncharacteristically understated braids. “You know, there is a bit of an undertone, in a certain light.” 

Gil-galad scoffs. 

“Why did Erestor choose to tell you this now?” Elrond asks. “And what are you going to do?” 

The King straightens his posture, as if summoning the Royal Architect. 

“Well, first of all there was a significant disclaimer that everything about _me_ be strictly understood as a conjecture, if a logical one. There isn’t any surviving paperwork, if there ever was any to begin with. So it’s not as if I can claim the lineage publicly, and I’m King already, aren’t I. Not to mention the whole Fëanorian aspect.” 

The King sounds particularly uncertain about this last bit. 

“Son of Orodreth it is,” says Elrond. 

Gil-galad shudders, but continues. 

“Erestor was more keen on making some kind of point about…family, and by implication that I’d been going about trying to make it happen the wrong way. Which I take it you are in agreement with.” 

Elrond’s memories of the harborside altercation are both too muddled and too overwhelming to fully recall, but he hasn’t forgotten the King falling before him, in terror and wrath. 

“I suppose I made that clear.” 

“Oh, you did.” The King gives a wry smile. “Yet I think Erestor was simply affirming to me that I’ve never been a conventional king. Nor was my father before me, nor was any High King before him, surely, if we expand the list of conventions.” 

“So has this all convinced you?” 

“Of what?” 

“Giving up being conventional.” 

“I think so.” Gil-galad nods, contemplating a butterfly flitting amongst the bolted stalks of Elrond’s herb garden, untended for many months. “But a little late, isn’t it.” 

He bows his head, and Elrond remembers Laswiniel’s request for gentleness. 

“It was her prerogative to leave,” he says. “But I wonder if she may yet return.” 

“I would not ask her to,” says the King. 

“Then would you pursue someone else?” 

Gil-galad shakes his head. “There is no other for me. If Laswiniel will not have me, there will be none.” 

Elrond has nothing else to offer but his silence. For a grave moment, the King seems to accept this gratefully. But Gil-galad can only sit with solemnity for so long; after a minute, his lip quirks again. 

“I have, however, found a solution to the issue of my still needing an heir.” 

Elrond nods. “There are many ways of obtaining children, as we know…” 

“You know, that’s the brilliant thing, Elrond—I don’t even _need_ to obtain one. You’re right here.” 

Gil-galad grins like a cat with a fish in its teeth, as something cousin to panic bolts up Elrond’s spine. 

“You’re not serious.” 

“I’m _most_ serious.” 

“I can’t be the High King of the Noldor. I’m three times more Sindar!” 

“Yet more disrespect on Turgon,” Gil-galad chides. 

Elrond stares at him. “Am I not currently under investigation for assaulting you? Are you mad?” 

“Always suspected I might be, given my lineage.” 

“Absolutely not. No. Never. And stop _looking_ at me like that!” 

This conversation is eventually interrupted by the arrival of pastries; however, it will remain ongoing for several thousand years.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did this already insanely convoluted fanfiction *need* backstory about ftm fingon and the political machinations therein? yes. yes it did. 
> 
> also i surprise-punched myself in the feelings with Erestor here?? like their dynamic is just Permanent Work Dad and Work Son, unto eternity, this is 100% professional and not at all about our dad and/or son feelings. definitely not. (i know 10 million things happened in this chapter but for some reason this is thing that keeps getting me, i should probably just write something about erestor)


	19. Elros

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~the end!~

**Elros**

Which is to say, Elrond stays. 

Summer comes to its height. Construction continues on the southern harbor at Harlond. There are some odd looks when he first returns to the city hall and jobsites, but what else is new? 

(After the Royal Guard spend several weeks standing over his shoulder as he files his paperwork, the King seems to persuade them to stand down.)

The southern harbor is built. There is a feast, or really a multiplicity of feasts. For a long while, even, there is no work to do at all. Time takes on a strange quality for Elrond; it feels at last truly Elvish, at once languorous and moving far too quickly. 

Perhaps this is because it is full of good things. 

His body heals from his mind’s exploits, and he finds it whole. Not perfect, not inchoately strong or tireless. Beautiful, maybe; a beauty that existed before, which he is only now learning to see. 

(Alendel helps with this, appreciating his beauty. Allowing Elrond to appreciate theirs.) 

Also: each time he looks in the mirror, he continues to be marginally less bearded. 

( _It only wants to act on what we desire,_ Elrond-the-Older had said. If the Maia—the fragment of Melian—must be constrained by his flesh, Elrond will give her this concession, this opportunity to please him. A subtle shift in raiment.) 

Elrond indulges the healers with many follow-up examinations. They sing their songs so often at him that he soon finds himself humming along, under the breath. When one day the injuries of a few workmen caught under a collapsed scaffolding take priority over his presence as an academic curiosity, Elrond finds himself joining the fray without a second thought. Fetching herbs, watching the setting of bones. Something about it feels strangely right. 

In moments like this, large and small, the city is working again. They are all working together, more or less. The King is obsequious with Alendel, until he realizes this will have no impact on their curtly neutral demeanor with him. 

(“Will they ever forgive me?” Gil-galad pleads to Elrond, more than one night at the bottom of a wine-decanter.) 

(“I’ll give it another century here,” Alendel says to him another night, in bed. “Two, on the outside.” 

Their goal is to firm up the trade-routes with the eastern Tawarwaith, shield them from the dependency their Sinda lords—now kings, self-styled—would impose. 

A century or two still feels like a very long time to Elrond, right now. He presses a kiss to their shoulder.) 

No longer constrained by blueprints, Erestor keeps designing things—with Celebrimbor, whose growing legion of apprentices gild every arch and gate in the city. Together they make telescopes, compasses, agricultural equipment, wind-up toys. Every time Elrond visits the King’s personal apartments, there are new and more elaborate candelabras. 

(“Would you still renounce your kinship among the Noldor?” Elrond asks him. “If given the chance.” 

Erestor doesn’t look up from his sketchbook, but he smiles. 

“Perhaps not, if we can manage to mean something different this Age.”) 

Lady Galadriel does not return his last letter for some time, and then her updates are brief dispatches from the early days of parenthood. The abrupt change of subject leaves questions unanswered, between them, and possibly tensions unfurled. Yet Elrond is starting to believe her, when she says that theirs will be a long conversation indeed. They have time. 

So the summer passes, and then it is summer again, before a Númenórean mariner finds him on the quayside one afternoon. 

“You’re the King’s brother?”

Elrond smiles, ignoring the Man’s wary expression—a duplicate of hundreds of confused stares he has seen cross the faces of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. Of thousands, millions more to come. 

“I am,” he says.

The Númenórean holds out a letter sealed with the sigil of the tree and stars. 

“Our post-route’s been shite with the storms. He wanted me to deliver personally, since I was taking the big boat.” 

Elrond accepts the slightly battered packet. “Please thank him for taking the care to do so.” 

The Númenórean nods, still scrutinizing. 

“So he’s a Man, and you’re an Elf.” He crosses his arms and settles in for an interrogation. “How’s that supposed to work?”

###

_Brother,_

_(I have no sense of when this will reach you, and so I address you at the moment you last addressed me. Forgive me if that is now long in the past.)_

_Well before I received your first letter, I had a dream in which I believed I saw and spoke with you. Pleaded with you, fearing you were leaving the world behind, and me. When I awoke I was deeply troubled. I know that dreams often reflect the mind itself, and its confusions. So our kindly captor once said when we had nightmares: that they were not real, and could do us no harm. (The harm he and his brother did, that was real enough.)_

_Yet other times dreams have come upon Elves and Men bearing messages from the Powers; other times dreams have sprung to life and walked among the waking. Or flown, as our mother did. (As our mother does.)_

_Stranger things have come to pass, yet for many months I doubted whether it was really you, Elrond, who I had spoken to—and clung to—or only a figment. What I remember of you, so only an aspect of myself, really. (Which you once were, and still are, though I will not reduce you to that only.) When your letters finally arrived—in short succession, I give thanks for once to our ongoing postal delays—and you recounted the same dream, I knew it to be true. Though I know from your second letter that you are again of sound mind and body (or were at the time of that writing, and I pray still), as well as your hypothesis about the nature of your ailment, I continue to be unsettled by the question you posed in the first letter. Not because I think it was wrong to ask. It is that I myself have already been asking it, when I am alone (which is not often) or afraid (which is)._

_Why did we have to choose? Could we have not refused this burden? Our forebears have pleaded before the Valar, swayed the God-mind to pity, to compassion. You did not exactly say this, brother, but in reading the long record of our childhood given in your first letter—by which I was many times moved to tears, even, perhaps especially, when your hand scrawled up the margins, how quick and uncensored were your thoughts—a thought stirred in me that I think you must know also._

_If we had remembered better how we love each other, how our love kept us alive through years of chaos, would we have chosen to be so irrevocably parted?_

_Again, I am feigning to speak for us both, when I can in truth I can claim only the trepidations of my own heart. It is I who left you behind. So thrilled was I by the high doom of our mother and father, I ran headlong into my own._

_But I think I know now that you and I are fated to lives more ordinary. Well, not ordinary-ordinary. What I mean is, tedious, at times. Anxiety-ridden. Less transfiguration, more paperwork. (Ha! You will be glad to know I have quite a bit of my own, these days!)_

_What I mean is: how strange it is, fitting into a life where you are trying to build something, a little day by day, when all your forebears (be they dead or merely inaccessible) composed the great unraveling tapestry of mythic history. Are we meant for great deeds, Elrond, or did the time for such things pass with the closing of the past Age? Are we relics, I suppose I must mean? I keep trying and failing to put my meaning to words. See how you have disturbed me!_

_And now you tell me of your encounter with the part of us that most belongs to the ancient past, and to myth. I admit I could not believe this at first reading, that the small sliver of our heritage that comes from our foremother Melian might be brought forth in such a way. But then I remembered Mother in her bird-form (though it is said that it was Ulmo’s doing, I can scarcely believe the trick would work so well with an ordinary Elf)._

_More importantly I remembered the times I have stood before my people and become possessed of a voice that rises from my throat unbidden, that speaks with honeyed tongue of our errand to this new land and its high purpose._

_Even when the larders run bare in winter, when every third man has lost a knuckle to frostbite and the pigs we brought over all die of some unknown malady, when my kingdom has naught to show for it but a few scattered settlements and a ragged fleet, when a child is mourned whose death could not be forestalled by our scarce stores of healing herbs, when these poor wayfarers have every reason to mistrust the strange Elvish king appointed by strange distant gods, still my people stand before me and cry loyalty, and love._

_If what you say of our nature is true, am I then holding them captive with my loveliness—with their desire—as Melian did to Thingol? Am I a Man or only a beautiful idea, of a new country unto Men alone?_

_Trick questions. I think we have both learned: though the choice was made, I am still not a Man, and you are still not an Elf. Perhaps it is Melian who stands in the way of it; perhaps we are just strange. Perhaps each of us will continue to approach his choice, through our lifetimes, but I do not know when we will ever reach them. Or I know I will only in dying._

_Forgive me my morbid talk. I have gotten to know death better, these past years, even more so than in the thick of war. Yet life I now know better, too. I ought to have started this letter telling you the good things: the wonder of the new plant varietals we find here, and the beauty of the land when it is not covered in snow (which is most of the year, though it is hard to remember with the drifts piling past my window). The excellent soft cheese I am snacking on this very moment. (The cattle, fortunately, have not all died yet.) The joy of watching a people who have only known battle live in peace, if not without hardship. Of working alongside them, for if I were a King who would not chase a duck or raise a roof-beam I would not deem myself much of a King at all. I would rather the labors of my hands win me my subjects’ loyalty, over the honey of my tongue (willed or unwilled)._

_I should say also there is a good woman, in the midst of all this, a woman who has never been beguiled by me and yet tolerates my strangeness. Darweth she is called, of the house of Hador (through descent from a cousin of his great-grandfather, and so we are not in so close of a relation through our grandfather Tuor; this we took some pains to determine, before pursuing matters). As I write she sits nearby me with her abacus and ledgers; you will not believe that she is our accountant! She bids me to invite you to visit, once we have suitable lodgings. The two of you will have much to discuss (foremost among them my many annoying habits)._

_I suppose one significance of this development is that there may someday be children, though I would not bring them into a life still so harsh. Yet the idea of knowing someone who is like me (since you are now so far away) is a comfort I dwell on, which motivates me to build a kingdom worthy of those children. I am grateful they will be unburdened by our Choice, though I hope they will not begrudge me their shot at immortality. I intend to learn how to be mortal alongside them. It will be a family project._

_Your children, if I remember correctly, will have to choose. I know they will choose well, for you will be the one to teach them about the world._

###

There are many more pages, addendums that Elros provides on plant varietals, on landscapes, on the erotic dimensions of accountancy. Elrond will read them all later. For now, he folds the letter back under its seal and slips it into his satchel.

He walks to the foot of the quay, taking the ladder down to the pebbled beach that runs below the seawall. The tide is going out, and he could make it almost all the way home on the shore. Elrond takes off his sandals, feels the silt under his toes. The late afternoon sun is deepening, casting the world in golden light; in the West, over Númenor, the evening star might be rising. On the eastern side of the sea, somewhere upon this same coastline, wanders the last living son of Fëanor, or so it is said. Gulls, of course, are crying as they skim the waves, falling over and over in their pursuit. There are things to mourn, and there are things to keep walking toward. For now, Elrond walks home.

_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the roll credits song for this fanfiction is ["not supposed to be wise"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3lIlmnnjj4) by jeff lewis :')
> 
> wow thanks to anyone who stuck with this! lots of messy elrond feelings! lots of loose ends probably not tied up! 
> 
> the sequel now exists, and is next in the series! it is much more of a romance - elrond/celebrian but in an extremely gay way, because i am extremely gay. i'm going through piecemeal and resolving inconsistencies between this story and the next (because people are still reading this!! thank you for reading it!!) so hopefully they will seem at least relatively continuous... 
> 
> writing this has been really important to me, as is your readership. [i'm here on tumblr](https://i-am-a-lonely-visitor.tumblr.com/) if any fellow elrond gays want to say hi!


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